"Well--'tis well that I should bluster! Hadst thou less unworthy proved: Would to God--for I had loved thee More than ever wife was loved. "Am I mad that I should cherish That which bears but bitter fruit? I will pluck it from my bosom Though my heart be at the root." "You have had a sad experience," the lady said, gently. "Have I not?" he said bitterly. "Ah, Mrs. Leslie, I cannot tell you what I suffered in learning my wife had cast me off. It seemed to me that I had gone mad in my grief and despair. I had a relapse of my illness and for long weeks struggled between life and death. I would sooner have died, but it was fated not to be. Slowly, wearily, I came back to life, and when I asked my father for tidings of her he told me that her parents had taken her abroad. Do I weary you, my friend, with the long recital of my sorrows?" he asked, pausing abruptly and gazing into her face with his beautiful, sad, black eyes. "No, I am deeply interested," she replied. "I wish to hear all that there is to tell." "There is little more to tell," he answered, sadly. "I was very proud, I loved my wife still, but I had no mind to force her obedience. I did not follow her to beg for her favor. I lent myself to my father's efforts to amuse and interest me, and tried to drown my sorrow in the mad whirl of dissipation and excess. In a few, a very few months, a formal letter came to my father from the Brookes abroad. Elaine, my willful child-wife, had died in giving birth to a little daughter. They wrote my father later on that the babe was dead, too." He stifled the hollow groan that rose to his lips, and bowed his face on his arm. Mrs. Leslie regarded him in silent pity, but she could offer no acceptable words of sympathy to the sharp pathos of a grief like this. "It grows late, I must hasten with my story," he exclaimed, glancing up at the sky from which all the sunset brightness was fading into "sober-suited grey." "You understand, Mrs. Leslie, that life was over and done for me then. I cared little what became of me, and my father urged me so persistently that a year later I married Lilia Lessington, the heiress he had chosen for me. I did not pretend to love her. I think she suspected something of my story, for she has always been bitterly jealous of me, and we have never been happy together." "You should have told her your story. She could not have been jealous of the dead," Mrs. Leslie said, gently.