“It was very sudden to—to us, as well as to you, and there was no time to send word to any one until it was over.” “Doesn’t it strike you that it was a very strange marriage?” demanded Madame Winthrop. “Yes, the circumstances attending it were very peculiar, and I was very much surprised when True asked me to be his wife,” Salome answered, flushing. “It seems that it was not so much a surprise as to prevent your ready acceptance of his quixotic proposal,” sneered Evelyn vindictively. Salome flushed crimson again at this thrust, then she grew white to her lips over the cowardly attack. All at once she seemed to become strangely calm and self-possessed, although she did not regain her color. “Allow me to ask,” she said, addressing Madame Winthrop, and not deigning to notice Evelyn’s insulting remark, “if Dr. Winthrop made you acquainted with all the circumstances leading up to our union?” “Yes, he did,” curtly responded the woman, a frown upon her brow. Salome’s face had cleared somewhat. If her husband had told his mother and sister of the romantic story of his wooing, they knew that he alone was responsible for their marriage, and they had no right to thus call her to account for having become his wife. “Then,” she said quietly, “since you know all that occurred in the City Hospital of Boston, you know just why he asked me to become his wife, and why I consented to do so, notwithstanding I had known him so short a time, and I cannot feel that you have any right to arraign me in such a manner during his absence for having married him.” Madam and Evelyn both opened their eyes in astonishment at this dignified, yet spirited response to their attack. It told them that they had a stronger and wiser spirit to cope with than they had anticipated. There was a moment of silence, then madam broke forth with more heat than she had yet manifested: “I should have supposed that any girl possessing proper self-respect would have hesitated to accept a proposal that must have been prompted by a feeling of gratitude. You saved my son’s life—there can be no doubt about that—he was grateful; you were ill, you had no home, no friends; your physician said you must not remain under the depressing influences of a public hospital, and so a sense of honor and of the great debt he owed you prompted Dr. Winthrop to ask you to be his wife, that he might try to save your life in return for the one you had given back to him.” Salome’s heart leaped with sudden pain at this cruel speech. As we know, she had been exceedingly sensitive upon this very point, and she had only just begun to have these fears allayed by his increasing tenderness, when these two women came so rudely in upon them and he was called away to his father. What wonder that all her former doubts began to be aroused by his mother’s cruel and unprincipled assertion? “Did Dr. Winthrop tell you that he was actuated by gratitude when he asked me to marry him?” she gravely inquired.