“I DROVE POOR VIOLA TO HER DEATH!” “Was ever any beautiful, thoughtless young girl more cruelly punished for the fault of coquetry?” thought Viola, as she buried her hot, burning face in her hands, her heart swelling with rage against Florian and Philip. “I hate them both!” she sobbed, miserably, in her bitter defeat, not comprehending yet the full enormity of the conduct that had roused her two lovers to resentment. Why, at the sea-shore last summer she had known a pretty girl from Chicago that was engaged to four young men at once, and played them off against one another in the most skillful fashion, to the amusement of all her girl friends who were in the secret. Viola caught herself wondering now how the pretty flirt had ever got out of the scrape. Then her thoughts came back to her own pitiful plight. How was she ever going to face to-morrow? True, she might take Philip’s advice and say they had quarreled, and she had thrown him over. But the thought of her father’s anger made her shudder with fear, and her passionate pride revolted at telling him the real truth--that she had been deserted by Philip and scorned by Florian. No; she dare not go to her father with either story, the humiliating truth, or the clever fiction suggested by Desha. In either case his wrath would be something terrible. She had learned this when he upbraided her in the case of George Merrington. She was thankful that Aunt Edwina, weary of the preparations for to-morrow, had retired early to her room. No one could know aught of the shameful humiliation that had come to her to-night--no one but those two heartless ones who had brought this irredeemable woe to her hitherto careless happy life. Viola sat still in her chair, crushing Florian’s harsh note between her icy fingers, her eyes staring blankly before her out of her deathly white face, seeing in fancy the wreck of her life lying in ruins at her feet. What a sensation there would be to-morrow when she had to face every one with the declaration that there would be no wedding! How could she ever face Aunt Edwina’s gentle surprise and persistent curiosity, her father’s wrath, and the wonder and the veiled mockery of her little social world? She had been so proud, so haughty--and now her pride was leveled in the dust. And she was too angry for repentance, too resentful to accept her fate. A passionate longing to punish Desha for his desertion throbbed at her heart, but alas! she was helpless. With Florian’s help she might have done it--might still have been wedded to-morrow, and turned the exchange of bridegrooms into a jest, baffling the world’s curiosity, and thwarting Desha’s intentions--but now the thought of to-morrow drove her mad. How could she face its keen humiliation and live? She to whom life had always been so fair and beautiful suddenly found it a dark and gloomy spot from which she shrank in blind terror, madly longing for death.