“Your mother urged them upon me, and I was disloyal enough to read them, every line,” a little triumphantly. He arose hastily and walked away for a few paces, drying and fanning his face with his handkerchief, then, returning, he leaned upon the back of her chair, and, dropping his voice, said huskily, and with quite uncontrollable emotion:— “Ellen—let me call you so this once, it remains with you whether I ever utter the name again—dear Ellen, answer this from your own sweet lips, have you a spark of love for that beas—man?” correcting himself too late. “I know how capricious the heart of a woman is, and perhaps—but no! take your time to answer, only give me your word,” and he walked swiftly away, and looked out on the sea, and saw the waves beat their soft white arms upon the sands, then returned. The woman had turned to ashen paleness. The ever-repeating and distributing electric light had forgotten the delicate tints of her dainty gown, and the color of her hair and brows, with the roses upon her bosom, and only the waxen face, with its dark eyes filled with glistening tears, uprose whiter than the beams. “Poor heart!” said he, noting the quiver of the sensitive mouth. “It ought not to be so difficult to speak the truth.” At length the tortured woman found voice:— “David Morning,” she said, in tremulous tones, “I am not meaning to question your right to give challenge to my despair, though, for reasons you can understand, it is from you, more than from all the world, I would have disguised it. You ask me if I love that man? I answer, No, no, a thousand times no! But my sense of obligation as his wife is as much stronger than my hate as misery is stronger than the social bars which contain it, and I deem it neither noble nor just to utter complaints against one who is, whatever may be said, my legal protector before the world. I do not deny that I have suffered untold agonies, but I may as well bear them in one cause as another.” “I confess,” said Morning, with a manner suddenly grown cold, “I do not fully understand you. You speak of ‘obligations,’ and ‘social bars;’ you cannot mean that you would deliberately sacrifice your woman’s soul, with all its honor and its aims, to a life of dishonor and deceit—for so I dare to name it—for dread of the idle dictum of a malicious social scarecrow?” The baroness winced, but quickly rallied, and, leaning forward in her chair, so near that he caught the perfume of the roses on her corsage, she replied:—