"I was five-and-thirty years old when Beatrix Gordon came to Eden, she a beautiful child of sixteen," went on St. Leon, slowly, as if looking back into the past. "Perhaps you will think I was too old for her, Mrs. Lynn, but my heart was carried by storm, as it were, by the lovely girl. I think almost from the first hour of our meeting I recognized my fate in her. She was like no other woman I ever met. If I talked to you all day, Mrs. Lynn," said St. Leon, looking deep into her eyes with his dark, mesmeric orbs, "I could never portray in words her beauty and sweetness. There was a charm of novelty about them. She was rarely original. She was afraid of me at first. _That_ piqued me, although it was my own fault. Very soon I found that my pique was the offspring of unconscious love. I, St. Leon Le Roy, who despised women, who had been angry at first at the girl's coming, had lost my heart to the slip of a girl who belonged to another. The bitter consciousness of that latter fact aroused my jealousy and added fuel to the fire of my passion. I was angry with myself, ashamed of myself, yet I could no more have checked the course of my strong, passionate love than I could have stemmed the tide of a rushing river. Can you understand me, Mrs. Lynn?" She answered quietly, "Yes," but to her own heart she said: "Ah, if he only knew." "Then you may guess something of what I suffered," said St. Leon, and for a moment he was silent, and his gaze turned from her face, as he seemed lost in retrospection. She looked at the dark, haughtily handsome face, and her heart thrilled within her. It had all its old, luring, magnetic charm for her. She had repented her fault long ago; she was sorry for her sin, bitterly sorry, but looking on her husband's face now, she did not wonder that she had sinned for his sake. In spite of time, in spite of pride, the old love was strong within her. She might have exclaimed, with Byron: "I deemed that time, I deemed that pride, Had quenched at length my early flame; Nor knew till seated by thy side, My heart in all save hope the same." It was well for her that when he resumed his story he did not look up. Too much of her heart was written on her lovely, mobile face. "From the despair of my jealous love and misery, I wakened to passionate bliss," he continued. "I know not when the child's first shyness and dread of me changed to a tenderer feeling, but it came upon me suddenly, and with heavenly sweetness, that she loved me. She had forgotten her lover in New York. Mrs. Lynn, I swear I believed she loved me even as I loved her, with a singleness and depth of devotion such as few hearts are capable of feeling. God forgive me that I doubted her once! No one was ever more cruelly punished for unbelief and hardness than I have been!" With his eyes downcast upon that low, green grave, he did not see how bitterly her lip curled as it always did when that night of her betrayal rushed bleakly over her.