"It needs not his love to plead your cause, Grace," he answered, in heart-wrung accents. "While I thought that your only fault was in deceiving me before our marriage, my own love pleaded unceasingly for you, my every effort was directed to the destruction of my fiery jealousy and anger toward you. I was succeeding. God knows this is true. The message I sent you by Captain Clendenon was the outgrowth of that milder mood. In all probability I should soon have returned to you--glad to call you mine, even though I knew you to have once loved another. _Once!_ My God! how little I knew of the dark reality! how little I dreamed of your deception until I saw you here to-day--with him!" "Oh! not _with him_!" she cried, in indignant denial--"oh! not _with him_! I had met him but that moment, and by the merest accident. Paul, was I to blame for that?" "Mamma, pretty mamma!" lisped the baby, reaching his arms to her in vague alarm at the papa who was grieving her so, and, with cold deference, he laid him in his mother's arms, as he answered: "Not to blame for meeting him accidentally, of course, Grace; but you were to blame for stopping him, for clinging to him, for looking into his eyes as you did, knowing what you did of the feelings existing between himself and me--deeply to blame." "I was frightened," she pleaded. "I did not think--it would have happened just the same had it been a stranger, and not Mr. Conway." "Ah, no!" he sneered, beside himself with jealous passion. "I have learned, too late, that your marriage with me was one of ambition and pride. There was love in the look you gave him, Grace--such love as you have never accorded me." He was walking excitedly up and down the floor, never even glancing at her. She sighed bitterly, pillowing her burning cheek against her child, as though to gather strength before she spoke again. "You are mistaken; it was fright, alarm, foolish nervousness; not love, God knows; anything else but that! I do not know how to please you, my husband. You are fearfully, causelessly jealous--oh! what _did_ you want me to do?" "I did not want you to touch him; I did not want you to speak to him or notice him. I _am_ jealous, Grace," stopping suddenly beside her, and gathering all her long fair ringlets into his hands, and lifting one bright tendril caressingly to his lips--"so jealous that I am almost angry with the very winds when they dare lift this treasured glory from your shoulders." She trembled so violently that she was forced to put down the child on a cushion at her feet. As she turned, with a mute gesture, as if to throw herself into his arms, he dropped the golden mass from his hands and coldly turned away. "I would like to know, madam," after a long pause, his voice ringing, clear, cold, steady, from the opposite side of the room, "why you chose to come to Washington at all--knowing it to be against my wishes--what object could you possibly have had, unless it were to see him?"