She started from her seat and looked about her. How long had she sat there musing—dreaming dreams which every instinct of womanly pride compelled her to renounce? She wondered if he had gone. Once more came that mingled hope and fear that he might seek an interview with her before leaving. The hope was stronger than ever, and for that reason the fear was stronger too.

A footstep in the hall arrested her attention, and she stood palpitating, with her hand upon her heart. It passed, leaving only silence; but it had been a useful warning to her. Suppose, in her present mood, Horace should make his way to her sitting-room and knock for admittance. Would she—could she—send him away, with her heart crying out for the relief of speech and confession to him as it was doing now?

With a hurried impulse she caught up a light wrap of dense black material, and passed rapidly into the hall. Her impulse was to go out of doors, to get away from the house until he should have left it; but in order to do this from her apartments, she must pass by the library, and this she feared to do. So she changed her purpose, and stepping softly that no one might hear her, she entered the long picture-gallery, and closed the door behind her with great care to make no noise. Many of the blinds were closed, but down at the far end where her picture hung there was some light, and with an impulsive desire to look at this picture, with a view to the impression that it might make on Horace when he should see it, she glided noiselessly down the room toward it.

The full-length portraits to right and left of her loomed vaguely through the half-light. She glanced at each one as she passed slowly along, with the feeling that she was taking leave of them forever. In this way her gaze had been diverted from the direction of her own portrait, and she was within a few yards of it when, looking straight ahead of her, she saw between the picture and herself the figure of a man.

He stood as still as any canvas on the wall, and gazed upward to the face before him. Bettina, as startled as if she had seen a ghost in this dim-lighted room, stood equally still behind him, her hand over her parted lips, as if to stifle back the cry that rose.

And still he stood and gazed and gazed, while she, as if petrified, stood there behind him, for moments that seemed to her endless.

Presently she saw his shoulders raised by the inhalation of a deep-drawn breath, which escaped him in an audible sigh. The sound recalled her. Turning with a wild instinct of escape, she fled down the long room, her black cape streaming behind her, and vanished in the shadows out of which she had emerged.

Somehow, she never knew how, she let herself out into the hall, and thence she sped through the long corridor, down the stairs, past the open door of the vacant library, and out into the grounds. She met no one, and when at last she paused in the dense shadows of some thick shrubbery, she had the satisfaction of feeling that she had been unobserved. Here, too, she was quite secluded, and in the effort to collect herself she sat down on the grass, her knees drawn up, her forehead resting on them, her clasped hands strained about them.

How long she remained so, while her leaping heart grew gradually calmer, she did not know.

A sound aroused her from her lethargy. It was the clear whistle of some one calling a dog. She knew who it was before a voice said,

"Here, Comrade—come to me, sir."

The voice was not far off, but the shrubbery was between it and her. She would have felt safe but for the dog. She did not move a muscle.

The footsteps were drawing near her, and now bounding leaps of a dog could be heard also. Both passed, and she began to breathe more freely, when what she had dreaded came. The dog, stopping his gambols, began to sniff about him. The next moment he had bounded through the shrubbery and was yelping gleefully at her side.

Instantly she sprang to her feet and stood there, slight and tall and straight in her long black wrap, the image of pallid woe. All the blood had left her face, and her eyes were wide and terrified.

It was so that she appeared to the man who, parting the branches of the thick foliage, stood silent and surprised before her. She might have been the very spirit of widowhood, so desolate she looked.

Raising his hat automatically, he said, in a strained, unnatural voice, "Can I do anything for you?"

She tried to speak, but speech eluded her.

"I beg your pardon," he said, "but can I do anything for you, Lady Hurdly?"

Oh, that name! She had had an instinct to free herself at last from the burden she had borne, and to tell him, in answer to his question, that he could do this for her—he could hear her tell of the wretched treachery by which she had been led to do him such a wrong, and of the misery of its consequences in her life. But the utterance of that name recalled her to herself. It reminded her not only who she was, but also who and by what means he was also.



"Leave me," she said, throwing out her hand with a repellent gesture. "I have gone through much, and I am not strong. If you have any mercy, any kindness, leave me to myself. It is not proper, perhaps, that I should ask any favor of you, but I do. I beg you not to speak or write to me again until I have done what must be done here, and gone away from this place and this country forever."

There was an instant's silence, during which Comrade nestled close to her and tried to lick her hand, all the time looking longingly at Horace. Then a voice, constrained and low, said, sadly: "I will grant your favor, Lady Hurdly. What of the favor I have asked of you?"

"I cannot. It is impossible," she cried. "Surely I have been humiliated enough without that. It is the one thing you have in your power to do for me, never to mention that subject again."

"I shall obey you," he said; "but in return I ask that you will not forget my request of you, though you have forced me to silence. While a wrong so gross as that goes unrepaired I can never rest. Remember this, and that you have it in your power to relieve me of this burden. Now I will go."

He turned and vanished through the shrubbery, Comrade after him.

Bettina sank upon the ground, covering her face with the long drapery of her cape. Suddenly she felt a touch. Her heart leaped, and she uncovered her head, showing the light of a great hope in her eyes.

But it was only Comrade, nestling close to her, with human-eyed compassion. She threw her arms around him, and pressed her face against his shaggy side.

"Did he send you to me, Comrade," she whispered, "because he knew that I was miserable and alone?"

The gentle creature whined and wagged his tail as if in desperate effort to reply.

"I know he did! I know he did!" she cried. "Oh, how kind and good and unrevengeful he is! And I can never tell him the truth. I can never tell that to any human being, Comrade, but I'll tell it to you." She drew his head close to her lips and whispered a few words in his ear.

Then she sprang to her feet, a great light in her eyes, as she threw her arms upward with an exultant movement, and cried, as if to some unseen witness up above, "I have said it!"



CHAPTER XIV

After this Bettina went about her preparations for departure with a spirit of calm and collectedness which came from the knowledge of herself, which she had at last fully accepted. Hundreds of times in these last few days her mother's words had come back to her: "The day will come when you will know what you are incapable even of imagining now—what is the one perfect love and complete union that can ever be between two human beings.... Test the world, if you will—and your nature demands that you shall test it—but you will live to say one day: 'My mother knew. My mother's words have come true.'"

It was even so. She knew now, at last, and the knowledge had come to her when inexorable necessity compelled her to separate herself forever from the man who, not suddenly, but by a system of gradual evolution—from the crude emotions of her girlhood through the growing consciousness of later years—had now manifested himself to her as all her heart could desire, all her spirit could crave, all her mature womanhood could need. She realized that he had long been this to her, but with a thick veil between herself and him which had hid the truth from her. The reading of the letter given her by Mr. Cortlin had torn that veil apart, and she saw him as he was, the man of her ideal. She did not, at the same moment, see her own heart as it was. This vision had come to her with her renewed intercourse with Horace, who had appeared before her now the ripe product of the noble possibilities which she had vaguely perceived in him once, when she had cared too little to think deeply of him in any way.

Oh, to have kept the place she had once had at his dear side! To have shared with him the privations of a life that would have been narrow and obscure indeed compared with the one which she had known in its stead, but, oh, how rich in the way she had now come to count riches!

Thoughts like these she had to fight against. Perhaps in the end they would conquer, and would hunt her to the death; but now, until she could get out of the country, she must put them down.

She had only a few days left, and she determined to devote a part of these to some farewell visits among the tenants. As far as she had been able to do, she had made friends with these poor folk, and had given what she could to relieve their necessities; but, in comparison with what was needed, the money at her command had seemed pitifully small.

When Lady Hurdly, dressed in her deep widow's mourning, descended the steps of her stately residence and entered the waiting carriage, whose black-liveried servants saluted her respectfully, she had a consciousness that servants and tenants alike must feel a certain commiseration for the great lady, such as they had known her, now sunk to poverty as well as obscurity. This feeling made her manner a little colder and prouder then usual as she sat alone in the sunshine of a lovely autumn morning and was driven between the beautiful English hedgerows and through the fertile fields which she had learned to love. How soon would all be changed for her! And changed to what? The isolated exile of a place filled with the haunting memories of the past—her mother, whom she had lost forever, and her young lover, who was as absolutely lost to her.

Strangely to herself, it was the latter that she felt to be the keener pain. To the former she was reconciled; as we do, sooner or later, reconcile ourselves to the inevitable; but the supreme sting of this other grief was that she felt it need not have been. Sitting there in her carriage, the object of much eager attention, she felt so desolate and wretched that it was with difficulty that she kept back her tears.

She dreaded the ordeal before her. She felt that she must take leave of these people and say a word of kindness to them, since she was so miserably unable to do more; but these visits were always depressing. Since the tenants had discovered that they had a sympathetic listener in her, they had luxuriated in the pouring out of their sorrows. Of course they had not ventured to accuse her husband of being connected with them, but the lesson was one that he who ran might read.

So, when the carriage stopped at the door of the first cottage, she had made up her mind that she could not stand much in the way of these miserable confidences to-day, and would make her visits short.

But when she entered the house she was conscious of a total change of atmosphere. Every creature in the room gave proof of this, according to his or her kind. The old woman who sat knitting by the hearth looked up at her with a dim twinkle in the eyes that had heretofore expressed nothing but a consciousness that things were bad and getting worse; and the children, who, indeed, had taken little count of the depression of their elders, now manifestly shared their relief from it. It was their mother who, with a strange smile of hope on her careworn face and a fervent clasping together of her work-worn hands, made the explanation to the visitor.

But this explanation, when it had been heard, was almost more of an ordeal to Bettina than the one which she had feared. Certainly it made a stronger demand upon her power of self-control. For the key-note of it all was Horace. He had been here before her, and had done, or promised to have done, all that she had so passionately wished to do. His name was on their lips continually; even the little children lisped it. It was "his lordship this" and "his lordship that," in a way that furnished a strange contrast to the studied avoidance of the word under former conditions.

Somehow, glad as she was, it was hard for Bettina to bear. In the midst of the accounts of what his lordship had done and said, and how he was to right all their wrongs and make everybody happy, she got up and took a hurried leave.

What was the use of her staying here? What was a little sympathetic feeling, more or less, to these wretchedly poor creatures? It was their material needs that they wished satisfied, and a stronger hand than hers was at work on these. And if—as seemed so plain, as she could so well imagine from her own knowledge of him—he was able and willing to give them the sympathy and interest as well as the practical help they needed, where was any use for her? There was none—nobody needed her, she told herself, desperately, and the sooner she lost herself in the oblivion of America the better.

Each cottage that she visited showed the same metamorphosis in its inmates. A lame boy to whom she had once given a pair of crutches had a new wheel-chair, and the crutches were thrown in a corner. A sick child for whom she had bought some prepared food, which it had not been able to take, had been sent off to a hospital for regular treatment, and its poor mother was enjoying the first rest of many years, with a consciousness that the child was better off than it could possibly be with her. An old man who had been long bedridden, and to whom she had sent some clean bedclothes, had been moved into another room with complete new furnishings, while the occupant of this room had been sent elsewhere, so that the distressing sense of over-crowdedness for sick and well was entirely gone from the house.

In almost every cottage that she visited she saw the same evidences. How pitiful her own efforts seemed beside these! What was heart compared with hand? What was sympathy compared with money? And was she so sure that she gave even the sympathy? She felt in her breast now no sense of pity for their suffering, no consciousness even of rejoicing in their relief. The only feeling there—and it seemed to fill her whole heart—was pity for her own numb, gnawing wretchedness, for which there could be no relief.

When the last hurried visit was ended, she drove home, completely unnerved. Her black veil was lowered before her face, and though she sat erect and composed to outward seeming, the tears rained down her cheeks.

Her remaining days at Kingdon Hall were spent in a state of such listlessness and inertia that Nora began to fear that she was going to be ill. She urged her mistress to send for the doctor; but, for answer, Bettina burst into tears, declaring that she was not ill, and begging Nora to do everything for her that was necessary to get her off on the steamer on which she had taken passage, as she felt unable to do anything herself.

How the intervening hours passed she never knew; but, as if taking part in a dream, she went through them all, and at last found herself settled in her state-room, with Nora to take care of her, and no one to spy on her or notice what she did. Asking Nora, as piteously as a child, to help her to undress, she went to bed, and from that bed she did not rise until the ship had touched another shore, and the breadth of the world lay between herself and Horace.

How glad she would have been to lie there and sail on forever, freed from her responsibility to the future, as she was from that to the past!



CHAPTER XV

It was when Bettina was a matter of three hours out at sea that Lord Hurdly arrived at Kingdon Hall, and, on being admitted, ordered the servant to say to Lady Hurdly that he wished to see her. His surprise was great when the man informed him that Lady Hurdly had that day sailed for America.

Dismissing the servant, he went to the library and shut himself up there alone. How strangely was this house altered to him in one moment's time! Just now he had felt a presence in it which had made every atom of it significant. Now, how dead, empty, meaningless, it had suddenly become!

The effect of this change was almost startling to him, and for the first time he had the courage to face himself and to demand of his own soul an explanation.

He was a man of a peculiarly uncomplex nature. When, on meeting Bettina, he for the first time fell deeply in love, he had looked upon the matter as a finality, and he had never ceased so to regard it. When she deserted him, without giving him a chance to speak, he had, in the overwhelming bitterness of his heart, forsworn all women. It had never occurred to him to put another in Bettina's place. For a long time a passionate resentment possessed him. When he knew that Bettina had married his cousin, this resentment had had two objects to feed upon instead of one; but at first the bitterness of his anger against the being in whom he had supremely believed greatly outweighed that against the being in whom he had never believed. Lord Hurdly had never had it in his power to wound and anger him as Bettina could. So, when he got transferred from St. Petersburg to Simla, it was with the instinct of removing himself as far as possible from Bettina. Of the other he scarcely thought.

When, however, the first consternation of the sudden blow was over, and he grew calm enough to be capable of anything like temperate thought, he tried to imagine how this strange state of things had come about.

Obviously Bettina must have sought Lord Hurdly out, and it was almost certain that she had done this with a view to mediating between him and his offending heir. He recalled her having said, more than once, that she intended to win him over, and he pictured to himself what had probably transpired in the fulfilment of her plan. Lord Hurdly, who was notoriously indifferent to women, saw in Bettina a new type, and, as consequent events proved, became possessed of the wish to have her for his wife. This being so, he had probably not scrupled as to the means to this end. Gradually, from having held Bettina chiefly guilty, Horace began to feel that it was quite possible that she had been less so than the artful and determined man, who had undoubtedly brought to bear on her all the wiles of which he was master.

What the wiles were, how unscrupulously they were employed to effect any end that he had in view, Horace was now more than ever aware.

And every fresh revelation of them tended to soften him toward Bettina. He was in the habit of trusting his instincts, and these had as determinedly declared to him that his cousin was false. On his return to England, after Lord Hurdly's death, both of these instincts had found ample confirmation. The more he looked into the affairs of his predecessor, in his relations to his tenants, his family, his lawyers, and the world at large, the more did his mistrust and condemnation of him deepen, while, as for Bettina, it took little more than the impression of his first interview with her to restore almost wholly his old belief in her truth and nobleness.

On the basis of her having been deceived by Lord Hurdly about him, he could forgive her her marriage. Where would her desolate heart have turned for comfort? And he knew her nature well enough to realize that what Lord Hurdly had to offer might have seemed likely to serve her as a substitute for happiness. He knew, moreover, that Bettina had never loved him in the sense in which he had loved her, and this fact made his judgment gentler.

As he stood there alone, in the great house, strangely empty now that her rich presence was removed from it, he wished with all his heart that he had gone to her, and forcing her to look at him with those candid eyes of hers, had said: "Bettina, tell me the truth. Why did you do it?" Oh, if he only had!

Then reflection forced upon him the possible answer that he might have received. She might have coldly resented the impertinence of such a speech, or she might have given him to understand that what appeared true was really true—namely, that his cousin's splendid offer was preferred to his poor one. Yes, he was no doubt a fool to hold on to his belief in Bettina in face of the obvious facts. The thing he had to do was to overcome it, and go on with his life and career quite apart from her.

This would have been the easier to do but for one thing. He had satisfied himself that Bettina had been unhappy in her marriage to Lord Hurdly. It was evident that the worldly importance which it had given her had not sufficed her needs. He knew—her own mother had avowed it to him—that Bettina was ambitious; but he knew, what the same source had also revealed, that she had a good and loving heart. What he felt was that she had been taught by bitter experience the emptiness of mere worldly gratification, and that poor heart of hers was breaking in its loneliness.

But then came reason again, and pointed to the hard facts before his eyes. What a fool he was to go on constructing a romantic theory out of his own consciousness when Bettina, by definite choice and decision, had proved herself to be, what he must compel himself to consider her, both heartless and false!

Fortified by the bitter support of this conception of her, he left the library, and, for the first time since his return, made the complete tour of the house. Through most of the apartments he passed swiftly enough, but in two of them he paused. The first was the long picture-gallery, where he looked critically at his own boyish portrait, wondering if Bettina had ever looked at it, and what feelings it might have aroused, and then passed on and stood before that most beautiful of all the Lady Hurdlys who had been or who might ever be. But this was too demoralizing to that mood of hardness that he had but recently assumed, and so he turned his back on the gracious image and walked away.

It was not long, however, before he found himself in Bettina's own apartments. These he remembered well, and in the main they were unchanged. Yet what a subtle difference he felt in them! Here on this great gloomy bed had that poor orphan girl slept, or else lain wakeful in the dread consciousness which must have come to her when once she realized the nature and character of the man to whom she had given herself in marriage. Here in this stately mirror had she seen herself arrayed in the splendid clothes which were the poor price for which she had sold her birthright. He stood and looked at himself in the mirror, with an uncanny feeling that behind his own image there was that of the beautiful Bettina, whom once he had thought to protect forever by his love and strength and tenderness, and who now, with only a hired servant, was alone in the great shipful of strangers, on her way to the loneliness of that empty little village which her mother's presence had once so adequately filled for her.

He went to the wardrobe and opened the door, hoping to find some trace of Bettina. But no; all was orderly and void. Then he passed on to the dressing-table and opened the drawers, one by one. In the last there lay a small hair-pin of fine bent wire. He had an impulse to take it, but, with a muttered imprecation on his folly, he called to aid his recent resolution, and hastily left the room.



CHAPTER XVI

Bettina had been in her old home a week—long enough to recuperate from her journey and begin to take up her life, such as it was to be. She would gladly have relaxed entirely and lain in bed to be waited on and tended by Nora, had this been possible. But she had wearied of the physical rest, which only made her mental restlessness the greater, and she had an impulse to reach out her empty hands so that somehow, somewhence they might be filled.

The neighbors had called on her promptly, but she could not see them. They reminded her too much of the mother she had lost. Mr. Spotswood had also called, but he was a reminder of the other loss, now the more poignant of the two. When she excused herself to him also he wrote her a note—the conventional thing, and that merely. It seemed strangely lacking in the solicitude and affection which she had a right to expect from her old friend and rector. Bettina was struck with this, and instantly there flashed over her a reason for it. It was only natural that he should feel a certain resentment of her jilting of one of his cousins, even though she had done it in favor of another and more important one. She remembered that the rector had been extremely fond of Horace, and at this thought she had a sudden desire to see him. So she wrote him a note and asked him to come.

It was so long since she had talked with any one, and she was so nervous after all her morbid imagining, that she was feeling utterly unlike the old self-reliant, active-minded girl he remembered when the rector entered the room. She also, on her part, was unprepared for the feelings aroused by the sight of him; and when he came in, his grave face and gentle manner so entirely unchanged, in contrast to all the changes she had undergone, Bettina felt a sudden tendency to tears. The thought of her mother also helped to weaken her, and the thought of Horace was a still harder strain on her endurance.

She saw a certain constraint in his manner first, as she had perceived it in his note. She felt unaccountably hurt by it, and when he took her hand a little coldly and inquired for her health, a rush of feelings overwhelmed her and she burst into tears.

In evident surprise, the visitor tried to soothe her as best he could. Naturally supposing that this grief was in consequence of her recent widowhood, he pressed her hand, and said, gently:

"I trust you are not overtaxing yourself by seeing me, my child. If you had preferred not to do so I should not have misunderstood. Your bereavement is so recent that—"

But Bettina, trying to silence her sobs, interrupted him.

"Oh, forgive me, Mr. Spotswood," she said. "I had not thought I should break down like this. I have been perfectly calm. It is not what you suppose. Oh, I feel so wretched, so lonely, so bewildered! I would give the world if I could speak out my heart to one human being."

The rector looked surprised, but visibly softened.

"To whom may you speak if not to me, Bettina?" he said. "Surely, whatever trouble is on your heart, you may count upon my sympathy."

Bettina did not speak. With her face hid in her pocket-handkerchief she shook her head, as if in dissent from the idea of his sympathy.

Feeling rather helpless, he changed his tactics, in an honest endeavor to get at the real cause of her trouble.

"Naturally, my child," he said, "the sight of me brings back the thought of your beloved mother. Such a sorrow—"

But again she interrupted him, this time by a silent gesture of the hand. Then she said:

"It is not that. I've got used to that ache, and although my heart would not be my heart without it, that is a silent and accepted sorrow now. Oh, Mr. Spotswood," she said, impetuously, uncovering her tear-stained face and looking at him with the helplessness of a child, "you are a clergyman; you teach that God is love and compassion and forgiveness; you have a kind heart! I know you have. Perhaps if I could tell you all I have suffered, and how deeply I have repented, you would be sorry for me, and not blame me as much as I deserve to be blamed."

She was looking at him tentatively, as if to see how far she could trust to the forbearance of which she felt she had now such need.

The rector's heart was deeply touched. This show of humility in the high-spirited, self-willed girl that he remembered took him by surprise.

"It could never be my impulse to blame you, my dear child, and the less so when I see how bitterly you are blaming yourself for this unknown thing. If you will tell me about it, I will do all that may be in my power to help you. At all events, you may count upon my loving sympathy."

"Ah, if I only could! It would be much to me now. But you are ignorant of what you are promising. In a certain way it concerns yourself, or at least a member of your family."

She saw a slightly hardened look come into his face, but it quickly gave way to a gentler one.

"No matter what it is, if you have suffered and repented, the best sympathy of my heart is yours."

"You will regard it as a confidence—a sacred confidence?" said Bettina. "I could only tell you with that understanding. I know that a clergyman is accustomed to keeping the secrets of his people, and I could not say a word unless I were sure that this thing would rest forever between you and me."



Wishing to soothe her in every possible way, the rector gave her his promise to keep sacred what she might tell him; and thus reassured, poor Bettina opened her heart. The relief of it was so exquisite and the experience was so rare, that she told it all with the abandonment of a child at its mother's knee, and with a degree of self-accusation that might well have disarmed condemnation, as indeed it did.

Up to the time of her meeting with Horace in England, she kept back nothing, describing with absolute truth her feelings as well as her conduct. When she had reached that point, however, a sense of instinctive reserve came to her, and a few brief sentences described what had happened since.

At the end of her recital she paused, looking eagerly into the rector's face, as if she both hoped and feared what he might say.

"Truly, my child, it is a wretched story," he began, as if a little careful in the choosing of his words, "but the knowledge of it has deepened instead of lessened my sympathy for you. Your fault has been very great, but so is your sense of compunction; and as far as suffering can expiate, surely you have done much to atone. My own knowledge of the character of the late Lord Hurdly was such that I cannot pretend to be greatly surprised at what you have told me concerning him. I regret to say it, but justice must be done to the living as well as to the dead. The present Lord Hurdly will prove, I trust and believe, an honor to the name. My intercourse with him has been comparatively limited, but no young man has ever inspired me with a stronger sense of confidence. So much do I feel this that I will confess to a strong desire that he should know upon what ground you acted toward him as you did. I have given my word to you, however, and perhaps it is as well. That poor man so lately gone to his account has stains enough upon his memory without this added one. And when I think of Horace—what he has suffered through the treachery of his kinsman—I feel that it is perhaps kindest to him also to leave this dark secret in the oblivion which buries it in our two hearts."

Bettina seemed not to hear his last words.

"He has suffered? You think he has suffered, and through me?"

"Is it possible that you can doubt it?"

"He gave no sign," began Bettina, hesitatingly.

"To you—certainly not. How could he?"

"Did he to you?" she said, breathlessly.

The rector looked at her with a sort of sad scrutiny, and was silent a moment. Then he said:

"He wrote me one letter—the most brokenhearted expression of suffering I have ever read. It was before your marriage, when he still had some slight hope that you had mistaken your own feelings, in the statement of them which you had made in your letter to him. But then came the announcement of your marriage, since which time your name has not been mentioned between us."

"Did you keep that letter?" she said.

"I did."

"Will you let me see it?"

"I am afraid I cannot properly do that."

"I beg that you will, Mr. Spotswood. You would be doing me a very great favor, and for your cousin's sake also I think I may venture to ask it. I was told that he was 'fickle and capricious, incapable of a sustained affection,' and much more in the same line. I should be truly glad to know that this was false."

"I can give you my word for that."

"But you can give me also his word, if you will," she said, beseechingly. "Oh, my dear, dear friend, I too have suffered, and I believe that what I have endured is the worst of pain, for it comes from the knowledge of wrong to another. You cannot take away that pain, but perhaps you can restore to me a lost ideal. I had come to think that there was no such thing as love—real love—in the world; to believe not only that the man who had professed it for me was false in that profession, but that it really did not exist. Let me see that letter. It is an impersonal thing to me now, but I feel that it would strengthen me for all my future life. I am going to try to be good; indeed I am," she said, her lips trembling like a child's. "If I feel that that letter would help me, why may I not see it?"

The rector hesitated visibly; then he said:

"You shall see it, Bettina. I cannot feel that it will do any harm, and it will be an act of justice, perhaps, to him as well as to you. Whoever represented him to be lacking in depth of feeling has done him a wrong indeed. I had no need to have this proved to me, but if there be such a need in any breast, the reading of this letter must do away with it."

In a few moments he rose to take leave, having promised to send the letter to her.

"Will you send it at once?" she asked. "May Nora go with you and bring it back?"

In the stress of her feeling she forgot the impression that her eagerness might make; but it had not been lost upon the rector, who pondered all these things in his heart as he went homeward.

When he had given the letter to Nora, and she had taken it to her mistress, he wondered if he had done well. Bettina had not pretended that she had really loved the man to whom she had first engaged herself. The preoccupied interest and affection which she had given him then were not misrepresented in her confession to the rector, and she had been absolutely silent as to her subsequent and present feeling toward him. All that she said, the whole burden of her song, was that she had so wronged him in that past time; never once had she hinted at the possibility of any renewal of relations between them.

In spite of all this, the rector knew Bettina well, and he recognized the fact that she was under the dominion of some larger and deeper feeling than he had ever known her to have except her affection for her mother. And had even that, he asked himself, so permeated her whole being—mind, soul, and character—as this feeling in which he now saw her so absorbed? He answered that it had not. It was, therefore, taking a certain responsibility upon himself to show this letter. But he was acting in the interest of truth and justice, and he could not find it in his heart to regret what he had done.

Temperate, judicious, deliberate as the rector was in all his mental processes, he could not imagine that any result could come from the course which he had taken, except some very remote one. Bettina had shown plainly her determination never to divulge to Horace the contents of Mr. Cortlin's letter; he was under promise to keep the secret also, so there was no ground upon which the intercourse between them could be renewed. Besides this, Bettina was but recently become a widow. The proprieties of the situation demanded absolute seclusion for a year at least, and, in Mr. Spotswood's consciousness, propriety was supreme. He never took count of the fact that conventions could be disregarded by any right-minded person, and to this extent at least he conceived Bettina to be right-minded.



CHAPTER XVII

The reading of that letter from Horace to the rector was a crisis in Bettina's life. Its effect upon her was singular. When she eagerly took in those pages filled with such anguish as possesses the heart but once or twice in a lifetime, the consciousness that it was she, Bettina, who had created such a love in the heart of the man that Horace Spotswood was to her now, so exhilarated her that she was capable of but one feeling—exultation. To have had this love, though now she had it not, seemed to glorify her life. To have caused him such sorrow—how greatly he had cared! In spite of all there was rapture in it!

That mood was followed by one of intense regret—an excoriating self-accusation that made her spirit writhe before her own bar of justice. Then, by degrees, when there came a moment of comparative calm, she forced herself to recognize the fact that it was the Bettina of the past who had been so loved, and that the man who had so loved her was that youthful and impulsive Horace. Was not the present Bettina, the slightingly treated widow of his cousin, a very different being—as different as was the present Lord Hurdly from that old and outgrown other self? Surely the change in both was great—a change which she construed as absolutely to her own disadvantage as it was to his advantage.

Yet, in spite of this, that letter brought a strange strength to her heart. Since it was now so plain that he had so truly, so worshippingly loved her, she felt a summons to her soul to be her highest possible, to overcome the slothful and the evil in her, and live as it became the woman who had been so loved by such a man. Above all, she longed to make her life avail for the good of others, that she might make it a thank-offering for what she had received in the knowledge that had come to her through that letter.

For, after its perusal, she knew that never again could she entertain the doubts which had so often filled her mind at the thought of the complete silence in which Horace had accepted her rejection of him. Sometimes she had fancied that it might have been a relief to him—a way out of a difficult situation; but now forever in her heart she could carry the proud consciousness that she had been as passionately loved as she had been desperately regretted.

It was a strange source, perhaps, from which to draw strength, but it availed her now. With a sudden renewal of the energy of her youth she began to look about her for work which she might do. Fortunately the rector was ready with practical, immediate employment for heart and hand, and pocket, too, alas! for now the fact was forced upon her consciousness that she was poor. It would be as one of themselves, only somewhat different in degree, that she must help these suffering ones, and, in spite of being hampered by this limitation, there was a certain sweetness in it. Her work among the poor had begun at Kingdon Hall, and there she had been often baffled by the sense of the difference between herself and those whom she wished to help. She knew that this consciousness was in their hearts as well as in hers, and that it made an impalpable but positive barrier. But now and here all was different. She longed for the money that would have enabled her to do so much more, and yet she felt it, somehow, sweet to be as they. Her consciousness of her own past wrong-doing had so penetrated her soul with humility that she was like a totally different being.

She had said nothing to the rector of her determination not to touch the money that her late husband had left her, but she strictly adhered to this resolve. It was impossible. She simply felt she could not. She found no difficulty in forgiving him for all that he had done. She was too tender-hearted to bear malice toward the dead, but she could not touch his money. Since she had once thought about it—receiving food and clothes and comforts from his hands—she had realized that it was an impossibility. She knew that the money was deposited in bank for her, but there it might remain. She had told Horace that she would not touch it, and he should see that she would keep her word.

Then came a thought that made her smile. He had wished to force upon her the acceptance of a larger sum, because it was not proper that Lord Hurdly's widow should live otherwise than in pomp and circumstance. If he could see her now! This it was that made her smile.

She had shut up all the house except the rooms on the first floor, in which she and Nora lived alone. She kept no other servant, and this economy it was that enabled her to give to others. She had almost no personal wants, and the income which had sufficed for her mother and herself was more than enough for her alone. A little sting of injured pride there had been at first, when her poverty became apparent to the neighbors, who naturally expected her to enlarge rather than curtail her expenses; but she soon got the better of this. The issues of her life were in a wider field than mere neighborhood comment, and, besides this, her friends and associates were now chosen chiefly from the class who were too ignorant for such comment and speculation.

For Bettina had thrown herself with a passionate fervor into the work which her hands had found to do. The one assuagement for the pain in her own heart seemed to be the alleviation of the pain in other hearts. She felt, also, a sense of thankfulness for the knowledge which had come to her through the rector, which made the whole work and service of her life seem all too little for her to give in return for this boon. As for Horace, her feeling for him was akin to worship. It was he who represented to her henceforth the ideal which, like a fixed star, should give light to her path, though so immeasurably far above her.

What a strange life was this into which she had now entered! She felt the certainty that her courage would be sufficient for it, but with all her resolution she could not always keep back the bitter tears of her wordless, hopeless, uncontrollable longing. At times this was a thing so mighty that she had the feeling that, if her body were only as strong as her spirit, she would be able to swim through those thousands of watery miles that separated them, only to tell him the truth, and then lay down her life at his feet.



CHAPTER XVIII

It was one of Bettina's weary days. Its hours had lagged and dragged until the evening had come, and she had sunk down, exhausted and depressed, in a big old-fashioned chair in front of her wood fire, which seemed the only ray of cheerfulness within or without. She had had these feelings before, and she knew that they would probably pass, but never before had it been so borne in upon her that life was sad and wretched alike for those whom she was trying to help and for her who was so in need of help herself—little as they dreamed it. Were they worth helping, those poor evil-environed creatures who so continually disappointed her hopes and efforts? Was she worth helping, either—weak, aimless creature that she was—who had vowed to be content in the mere consciousness that Horace lived, and that he had once supremely loved her, and then again and again had fallen into this hopeless discontent which thirsted so for what she had pledged herself to give up—the possession of that love to satisfy the present hour's need?

She lay back in the big deep chair, her white hands loosely grasping its arms, and her white lids lowered. Now and then a tear would trickle from beneath those lids and a slight contraction of pain would move her lips. Any one looking in upon her so might well have wondered where were the friends and companions of this beautiful, lonely woman, shut into this small room, in the silence of a twilight that hung damp and gray outside, and that the smouldering fire lighted but fitfully within, while the low murmur of flames fitfully broke the silence.

Not a sound escaped her lips. She gazed longingly, sadly into the glowing heart of the fire, and saw visions and dreamed dreams, but not pleasing ones; they only served to make her sadness deeper.

Presently the door opened, and Nora came in with the lamp. Glancing at her mistress, who did not move, the woman then went out and brought a small tea-service on a tray.

"Don't light the kettle yet, Nora," said a low voice from the depths of the chair. The speaker did not move; her manner was that of a person who deprecated the least noise or intrusion, and Nora took the hint and silently put down the tray. Then, in the same dull tone, her mistress said:

"I know you want to go to church. Go. I can make tea for myself when I want it."

Nora, in comprehending silence, left the room.

Still the relaxed figure in the chair moved not. The fire whiffed and crackled now and then, but beyond this there was no sound. The lamplight showed more plainly the fair youth and loveliness of that black-clad form, which never, in its most brilliant days, had looked so exquisite as now, when there was none to gaze upon its beauty or to share its solitude. The hands were ringless, for Bettina had taken off her wedding-ring after the reading of the letter which the lawyer had brought her, and with it she had renounced the last vestige of allegiance to her late husband's memory. There was no bitterness in her heart toward him. Simply he existed not, as though he had never been.

Vaguely she heard the sound of Nora's departure, as the door was closed behind her, and still she sat there wordless, motionless, almost breathless as it appeared, for her bosom scarcely seemed to move.

Presently there came two tears from under the closed lids; then quickly others followed them. The sense that she was freed even from the danger of Nora's observation weakened her more and more. Then with the helpless, whispering tones of an unhappy child, she said:

"My God, how desolate I am! How can I bear it? How long must it endure?"

Still she did not move except to raise her lids and cast upward her tear-drenched eyes, while she caught her lower lip between her teeth.

Suddenly there was a step upon the piazza—a man's step, as if in haste. She started and sat upright. Who could it be? No man except the rector ever visited her, and this was not the rector's step. She hastily brushed away the traces of her tears and sat listening.

Then came a tap at the door—not loud, but firm, distinct, decided. It sounded strange to her, unlike the tap of any messenger or servant who had ever come to her house.

She got up, leaving the door of the sitting-room open that the light might enter the dark hall.

Then, most unaccountably, a sense of fear, very unusual to her, seemed to possess her. She stood still a moment in the hall and waited.

The knock was repeated, so near this time that it made her start. She was not naturally a timid woman, but she felt a sense of physical fear which was totally unreasoning. What harm was likely to come to her from such a source? She compelled herself to go forward and open the door.

It was very dark outside, and she vaguely distinguished the outline of a tall man standing before her. The light from the open door at her back threw out her figure in distinct relief, and it was evident that she had been recognized, for a voice said, in low but distinct tones,

"Lady Hurdly."

She gave a cry and pressed both hands against her breast, sharply drawing in her breath. Then she took a few steps backward, throwing out one hand to support herself against the wall.

"Forgive me," said the well-known voice—the voice out of all the world to which her blood-beats answered. "I have come on you too suddenly. I ought to have written and asked permission to call. I should have done so, only I feared you might deny me."

Somehow the door was closed behind them and they had made their way into the lighted room. Bettina, still pale and breathless, began to murmur some excuses.

"I beg your pardon; I was frightened. Nora had gone out, and I was all alone. I did not know who it might be. I never have visitors, and I was afraid to open the door."

He was looking at her keenly.

"You should not be alone like this," he said, both resentment and indignation in his tone. "Why do you never have visitors? Why did Nora leave you? Where are the other servants?"

"There are no others. There is only Nora," she said, recovering herself a little. "I let her go to church to-night. I am not usually afraid. Why should I be? Perhaps I am not very well." As she uttered these incoherent sentences she sank into a chair and he took one near her.

The expression of his face had changed from anxiety to a stern sadness.

"And you live alone like this," he said, "without proper service or protection? And, in spite of all that I could say and do, you will not take the miserable pittance which is your own, and which is wasted there in the bank, where it can avail for no one? Do you think this is right to yourself—or kind to me?"

The quiet reproach of his tone disturbed her.

"I do not mean to be unkind," she said, her voice not quite steady, "and indeed I have all that I need. Nora has more than time to attend to me, and as for company, it is because I do not want it that I do not have it."

"And you think you can live without companionship?" he said. "You will find you are mistaken; but of that I have no right to speak. There is one subject, however, on which I do claim this right, and it is the fulfilment of this purpose which has brought me to America."

"You came all this way to see me?" she said, lifting her brows as if in gentle deprecation. "You were always kind." Her voice broke and she said no more.

"It is not a question of kindness," he said. "It is a matter of the simplest right and duty. Will you hear me? Are you able to hear me to-night, or shall I come again to-morrow?"

"Speak now," she said. "I am perfectly well, and am ready to hear whatever you may have to say."

Her voice gave proof of a recovered self-control. The necessity of making this a final interview between them was borne in upon her, and sitting very still and erect, with her hands clasped tightly together, she waited to hear what he might say.

"Your leaving England so suddenly," he began, "was, as I need not say, a disappointment to me. I had hoped to change your mind and purpose concerning the acceptance not only of money which is your own by legal right, but of such as is also yours by every rational law of possession. It was to me an insupportable idea that you should go away without the means of living as becomes your rank and station."

Bettina, with a rather chill smile, shook her head.

"Rank and station I have none," she said. "I have money enough to live as becomes my mother's child; that I am, and no more. It is the only bond to the past which I acknowledge. The name and title which I bore a little while were never mine in a real and true sense. I do not care to speak of it; it is all past; but the very fact that your cousin saw fit to leave me with what you call a mere pittance shows that he felt the distance, the lack of union, between us, as I felt and feel it."

It was a relief to her to say this much. He could gather nothing from it, and she wanted him to know that she had freed her soul from every vestige of its bondage to the man whom she chose to designate as his cousin rather than by any relationship to herself—even a past one. This point did not escape him.

"It is with humiliation that I receive your reminder that that man was, in flesh and blood at least, akin to me," was the answer; "and for that reason I have felt it to be my duty to make whatever poor reparation may be in my power for the evil that he has done."

He spoke with extreme seriousness, and there was a tone in his last words which conveyed to Bettina the suspicion that they referred to something more than any act of Lord Hurdly's which had heretofore been mentioned between them.

She waited, therefore, in some agitation to hear what his next words should be.

"I shall have to ask your forgiveness," he said, "for touching upon a matter which might well seem to be an impertinence on my part. The necessity is forced upon me, however, and I shall be as brief as possible, if you will be good enough to listen."

Bettina answered merely by a bend of the head.

"As long as I can remember," he began, "I have had a certain instinctive distrust of the late Lord Hurdly. It grew with my growth; but I never thought it proper, under the then existing circumstances, to give expression to it. As time went on, observation confirmed instinct, and it became evident to me that he was a man of powerful will, and was more or less unscrupulous in the attainment of its ends. After his death, in going into the affairs of the estate, and various other matters which came under my observation, I found that the truths laid bare before me revealed him as a far worse man even than I had imagined. It was a revolting manifestation in every sense; but even when those matters had been closed up—when I supposed that I was done with the man and aware of the worst—a revelation was made to me which, though of a piece with the rest, and no worse in its essence and kind, came home to me with a thousandfold intensity, from the fact that it nearly concerned both myself and you."

Bettina's heart beat wildly. She dared not look at him, and with an instinct to protect herself from betrayal at every cost, she said, in a voice which was so cool and calm that the sound of it surprised her as it fell upon her ear:

"Go on. Explain yourself."

She had taken up a paper from the table and was using it as if to screen her face from the fire, but she managed to get somewhat in the shadow of it, so that her companion had only a partial view of her features and expression. In this position, with her eyes bent upon the fire, her countenance was wholly inscrutable to him. There was a moment's silence before he continued.

"How far the explanation is necessary," he said, "I do not know. I am aware that you received a sealed letter, through Cortlin, from a man named Fitzwilliam Clarke, who is now dead. What that letter contained is your own affair. I also received a letter from the same source and by the same hand. It is of the revelation contained in that letter that I am come to speak to you."

Bettina hardly knew whether she was waking or sleeping. The astounding suddenness of the consciousness which had come to her now seemed to stun both her body and her mind. She made no sign, however, as she sat absolutely still, and her companion went on.

"The letter to you was delivered, you remember, before my return to England. The interval which elapsed before the delivery of the letter to me—which occurred scarcely more than a week ago—was due to the fact that Cortlin had been instructed to put each of these letters into the hands of none but the man and woman to whom they were addressed. In the second instance he was prevented by illness from the prompt performance of his duty. He has had a long and serious attack of fever. As soon as his condition of health permitted he sent for me and put the letter into my hands, telling me that he was ignorant as to its contents, but that a letter from the same source had been delivered to you by him immediately after the death of the scoundrel whose treachery had betrayed you into a marriage with him."

Bettina could not speak or look at him. The thoughts which were seething through her brain were too confused for speech. One thing, however, was quite clear to her. The resentment that this man so fiercely manifested was for her sake, not his own. His anger was an impersonal thing. He had a manly and chivalrous nature, and the mere fact that her mother had once committed her into his keeping would constitute a strong claim on such a nature. He was outraged that a countryman and kinsman of his own could so villanously have duped her. As for his own wrongs in the matter, he apparently did not consider these. For all consciousness of them in his words and tones they might never have existed.

While these thoughts were passing through her mind, he had risen, and was pacing the floor with restless strides. Now he paused in front of her and said:

"I trust it may not seem to you that I did wrong to come to you and tell you of the revelation that had been made to me. I have done it in the belief that the letter which you received conveyed the same information. May I be allowed to know if this is true?"

Bettina bent her head, but said no more.

"Then I feel myself justified in having come," he said, in a tone of relief. "If I could have known you ignorant of the infamous wrong that was done you, by the unscrupulous means used to beguile you into a marriage which must so have tortured and humiliated any woman, I might have kept silent. It might perhaps have been best to omit from the list of the wrongs you must have suffered this crowning infamy of all. But since it seemed certain that you knew it, and since it had doubtless been the reason of your refusing to touch the money which was so rightfully your due, and of your leaving the country where this great wrong had been done you, I could not rest until I had spoken. I could not still the longing to give you a certain solace which I hoped it might be in my power to give. I knew how sad and lonely you were. I had written to the rector and asked for tidings of you."

"You had? He never told me," she said, wonderingly.

"I particularly bound him not to do so; but I did write more than once, and got his answers. In that way it came to me that you were unhappy—courageously and unselfishly, yet profoundly so, and it was not difficult for me to comprehend the reason. You will forgive me for going into a dead and buried issue for this once; but I knew your nature, and it was obvious to me that you were torturing yourself because you felt that you had done a wrong to me."

Bettina caught her breath suddenly, and covered her face with her hands.

"Is it not so?" he said.

But she could not speak. The shrinking anguish of her whole attitude was her only answer.

Then he took the seat nearest her, and said:

"It is with the hope of lifting this totally unnecessary burden from your mind that I have come. I beg you to have patience with me while I speak to you quite simply and tell you why you would be doing wrong to blame yourself on my account. For this once I must ask you to let me speak of the past—not the recent past—let us consider that in its grave forever—but the remote past, in which for a short while I had a share. I, too, have my confession to make and pardon to beg, for I am conscious that I wronged you, though it was through ignorance, youth, inexperience, and also—forgive me for mentioning it, but it is my best justification—also because I loved you, with a love which I was then too ignorant even to comprehend. I needs must beg you to remember that, in owning my great wrong to you. This wrong," he continued, after an instant's pause, "consisted in my urging you to marry me when you did not love me. I feared it was so, even then; but I was selfish; I thought of myself and not of you. When the whispered misgiving would rise up in my mind I forced it down by vowing that if you did not already love me I could and would make you do so. When the blow fell, and I knew that I had lost you, I knew that my selfishness in thinking chiefly of my own happiness had been properly rewarded. At least this was the feeling that possessed my heart after the first. You were young, confiding, inexperienced. I knew better than you possibly could know that you did not love me. Later, you knew it also."

He waited, as if for her response. From behind her close-pressed hands the answer came.

"Yes," she said, lowly, "I have long known that it was a mistake on my part. You are right. I did not love you."

Had she been looking, she would have seen a shadow cross his face—a very faint one, as the hope that it obscured had been faint also.

"Therefore," he said, "I took advantage of you, and obtained from you a promise which I should never have asked. I want you to feel that I realize the wrong I did you in that, and ask your forgiveness for it."

Slowly she lowered her hands and looked at him.

"And you can ask forgiveness of me?" she said.

"I humbly beg it—as on my knees."

"Then what should be my attitude to you?"

"The proud and upright one of never having done me any conscious wrong."

"But when I left you, rejected you, threw you off—"

"That was not done to me, but to the man you supposed me to be—the man who had been proved to you a scoundrel, by such proof as any one would have deemed you mad to doubt."

She looked at him somewhat timidly.

"You are generous indeed," she said.

"I am no whit more than just. You were absolutely warranted in such a course toward me. What I long to do—what I have crossed the world in the hope of doing—is to get you to forgive yourself, to free yourself of a hallucination which is casting a needless shadow on your life."

"Oh, you are good—good!" she said. "I never knew so kind a heart. Therefore must my unending misery be the greater that I have once wounded it."

"That consciousness should have no sting for you hereafter. You did it in utter ignorance. I cannot claim that I was half so ignorant in my wrong toward you. But surely we may remember that we have once been friends, and so we may feel that there is full and free forgiveness between us before we part."

She did not speak. That last word had pierced too deeply to her heart.

"You do forgive me—do you not?" he said, as if he misunderstood her silence.

"I thank you—I bless you—I seek your forgiveness," she said.

At these last words he smiled—a smile that had a certain bitterness in it. Then suddenly his face became rigidly grave.

"If I had not given you my forgiveness, long ago," he said, "I should like to offer it to you now, at a price. I wish to God that I could."

"What do you mean?" she said, a sweet perplexity upon her face. "What price have I to pay for anything?"

"Ah, there it is! It may seem brutal of me to put a literal construction upon what you have used as a figure of speech, but let the truth come out. You are poor, unprotected, alone, and you ask me to go and leave you so! God knows it is little enough that I have it in my power to do, but the possession of money would enable you at least to live as it becomes you to live. I do not speak of your title—it is not what you are called, but what you are, that I have in mind. If you had money, even the small income which I so desire that you shall accept, your life would be different."

But Bettina looked away from him, and shook her head in the gentle negation which he knew to be so final.

"How would my life be different?" she said.

"You could make it so."

"In what way?"

"You could travel, for one thing."

"I do not want to travel. I desired it once, and I got my wish. But with it came a wretchedness that all the travelling in the world could not carry me away from."

"Then what is to be your life?"

"What you see it now. I do not wish to change it for any other. I have tried the world and its rewards. There is nothing in them."

Her tone of absolute, unexpectant decision maddened him.

"My God, Bettina!" he exclaimed, too excited to notice that the name had escaped him. "Are you in earnest? Can you mean it? I wish I could believe that you did not. But there is a deadly reality about you now which makes me fear that you will keep your word. That you should spend your life in this isolation, that you—you—"

He broke off, as if words failed him.

"What better can I do?" she said. "You must not think of me as idle and useless. I am going to try not to be that. I have tried a little. Ask the rector. And I am going to try more. There is but one thing that I deeply desire, and that is to be a better woman than I have been in the past. Oh, I will try hard—I will, indeed I will—to do a little good in the future, to make up for all the harm I have done!"

She ceased, her voice failing her, and as she looked at the man standing near her she saw that he was scarcely listening. Some intense preoccupation made him take in but vaguely what she was saying. She saw that he was deeply moved in some way, and the consciousness that this was so gave her a sense of alarm. She felt her own will weakening, and she knew that somehow she must get this parting over, if her strength were to suffice for it.

"Good-bye," she said, holding out her hand.

"Don't be too sorry for me. You have lightened my heart inexpressibly by what you have told me. Now that I can feel that you know all—that, wrong and wicked as I was, I was not so false as it seemed—I can bear the future with courage. I am sure of it. I want to say good-bye now, because I prefer not to see you again. You would only try to shake me in a determination that is not to be shaken. Don't trouble about me—please don't," she added. "I have health and youth, and these will suffice me for what I have to do."

"Health and youth!" he cried, ignoring her proffered hand, and throwing his own hands up in a gesture of repudiation. "And what do these signify in a situation such as yours? They only mean that you will prolong an existence which, for such a woman as you, seems worse than death. You ask me to leave you so? To say good-bye—"

"Yes, I beg it, I implore it, I insist upon it," she interrupted him, feeling that her strength was almost gone. "You have said that you were willing to do me a service—then leave me."

She sank back in her chair exhausted.

"My God! am I a brute?" he said. "Have I made you ill with my idiotic persistency? I will go. I will rid you of the distress and annoyance of my presence. But before I go, Bettina," he said, with a sudden break in his voice, "I must and will satisfy my heart by one thing: I must, for the sake of my own soul's peace, tell you this. I have never ceased to love you, and I never shall. I gave you up when I saw the renunciation to be inevitable, but I knew then, as I know now, that I can never put any other in your place. You were the love of my youth, and you will be the love of my old age, if my lonely life goes on till then. Don't turn from me. Don't hide your face like that. I ask nothing but this sacred right to speak. I know you never loved me. I know it is not in me—if, indeed, it be in any mortal man—to enter into the heaven of being loved by you. But, at least, you have been the vision in my life—the sacred manifestation of what girl and sweetheart and woman and wife might be—and for that I thank you. In the shadow of that beatific vision I shall walk henceforth, and believe me when I say that I shall walk there alone."

Bettina, with her face buried in her hands, remained profoundly still. When he had waited a moment he began to fear that he had overtaxed her strength too far, and that she might have fainted.

Kneeling in front of her, he took her two wrists gently in his hands and tried to draw them away from her eyes. The strong resistance that she made to this gave evidence enough that she was conscious in every sentient nerve.

"Forgive me," he said; "I am going—I have been wrong to force all this upon you—but it is the last time that we shall meet. Let me, I pray you, see your face once more before I turn away from it forever."

The tense hands relaxed within his grasp, but he caught no more than a second's glimpse of the beautiful face before it was hid against his shoulder.

At the same instant a low voice whispered in his ear:

"Don't move until I speak to you."

Overwhelmed with wonder, he felt the hands which he had grasped now holding fast his own, that she might compel him to the stillness which she had commanded. Then the soft voice at his ear went on:

"You were right in saying that I did not love you—that you would have urged me into a marriage to which I could not have brought the true feeling. I did not know it then, but I know it now. And I know it now because—because—" her voice trembled and her breath came quick—"because now I do love you. Oh, Horace, better love than this man could not have or woman give."

She ended in a burst of tears, and her exhausted body leaned against him for support.

For a moment he felt an amazement so overwhelming that he seemed half unconscious from the whirling in his brain. Then, as a lightning flash lights up the whole dark heaven in an instant's time, the truth was revealed to him, and, with that consciousness, his arms were tight about her and his kisses on her lips.

If he questioned her at all, it was with his spirit, and her answer came in that ineffable sense of union which fused their souls in one. For long still moments they rested so, in that embrace, and when they moved apart and looked into each other's eyes it was to take up forever that united life which was to bind them in true marriage.

* * * * *

When Nora returned from church she found them sitting quietly before the fire, the lamp burning brightly under the kettle, from which the Lady Hurdly that was and was to be had just made tea for her lord.

THE END



BY MARY E. WILKINS

SILENCE, and Other Stories. Illustrated. 16mo, Cloth, Ornamental, $1 25.

JEROME, A POOR MAN. A Novel. Illustrated. 16mo, Cloth, Ornamental, $1 50.

MADELON. A Novel. 16mo, Cloth, Ornamental, $1 25.

PEMBROKE. A Novel. Illustrated. 16mo, Cloth, Ornamental, $1 50.

JANE FIELD. A Novel. Illustrated. 16mo, Cloth, Ornamental, $1 25.

A NEW ENGLAND NUN, and Other Stories. 16mo, Cloth, Ornamental. $1 25.

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YOUNG LUCRETIA, and Other Stories. Illustrated. Post 8vo, Cloth, Ornamental, $1 25.

GILES COREY, YEOMAN. A Play. Illustrated. 32mo, Cloth, Ornamental, 50 cents.

Mary E. Wilkins writes of New England country life, analyzes New England country character, with the skill and deftness of one who knows it through and through, and yet never forgets that, while realistic, she is first and last an artist.—Boston Advertiser.

Miss Wilkins has attained an eminent position among her literary contemporaries as one of the most careful, natural, and effective writers of brief dramatic incident. Few surpass her in expressing the homely pathos of the poor and ignorant, while the humor of her stories is quiet, pervasive, and suggestive.—Philadelphia Press.

It takes just such distinguished literary art as Mary E. Wilkins possesses to give an episode of New England its soul, pathos, and poetry.—N. Y. Times.

The pathos of New England life, its intensities of repressed feeling, its homely tragedies, and its tender humor, have never been better told than by Mary E. Wilkins.—Boston Courier.

The simplicity, purity, and quaintness of these stories set them apart in a niche of distinction where they have no rivals.—Literary World, Boston.

The charm of Miss Wilkins's stories is in her intimate acquaintance and comprehension of humble life, and the sweet human interest she feels and makes her readers partake of, in the simple, common, homely people she draws.—Springfield Republican.

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BY RUTH McENERY STUART

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IN SIMPKINSVILLE. Character Tales. Illustrated. Post 8vo, Cloth, Ornamental,1 25.

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THE STORY OF BABETTE: A Little Creole Girl. Illustrated. Post 8vo, Cloth, Ornamental, $1 50.

Mrs. Stuart is one of some half-dozen American writers who are doing the best that is being done for English literature at the present time. Her range of dialect is extraordinary; but, after all, it is not the dialect that constitutes the chief value of her work. That will be found in its genuineness, lighted up as it is by superior intelligence and imagination and delightful humor.—Chicago Tribune.

Mrs. Stuart is a genuine humorist.—N.Y. Mail and Express.

Few surpass Mrs. Stuart in dialect studies of negro life and character.—Detroit Free Press.

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BY CONSTANCE F. WOOLSON

MENTONE, CAIRO, AND CORFU. Illustrated. Post 8vo, Cloth, Ornamental, $1 75.

To the accuracy of a guide-book it adds the charm of a cultured and appreciative vision.—Philadelphia Ledger.

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Characterization is Miss Woolson's forte. Her men and women are not mere puppets, but original, breathing, and finely contrasted creations.—Chicago Tribune.

Miss Woolson is one of the few novelists of the day who know how to make conversation, how to individualize the speakers, how to exclude rabid realism without falling into literary formality.—N. Y. Tribune.

For tenderness and purity of thought, for exquisitely delicate sketching of characters, Miss Woolson is unexcelled among writers of fiction.—New Orleans Picayune.

For swiftly graphic stroke, for delicacy of appreciative coloring, and for sentimental suggestiveness, it would be hard to rival Miss Woolson's sketches.—Watchman, Boston.

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BY LILIAN BELL

THE INSTINCT OF STEP-FATHERHOOD. Stories.

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A LITTLE SISTER TO THE WILDERNESS. A Novel. New Edition.

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THE UNDER SIDE OF THINGS. A Novel. With a Portrait of the Author.

This is a tenderly beautiful story.... This book is Miss Bell's best effort, and most in the line of what we hope to see her proceed in, dainty and keen and bright, and always full of the fine warmth and tenderness of splendid womanhood.—Interior, Chicago.

THE LOVE AFFAIRS OF AN OLD MAID.

So much sense, sentiment, and humor are not often united in a single volume.—Observer, N.Y.

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BY MARIA LOUISE POOL

THE RED-BRIDGE NEIGHBORHOOD. Illustrated by CLIFFORD CARLETON. $1 50.

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The author's narrative gift is as nearly perfect as one could wish.—Chicago Interior.

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Miss Pool is one of the most distinctive and powerful of novelists of the period, and she well maintains her reputation in this instance.—Philadelphia Telegraph.

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FOLLOWING THE GUIDON. Illustrated. Post 8vo, Cloth, Ornamental, $1 50.

The story is a thrillingly interesting one, charmingly told.... Mrs. Custer gives sketches photographic in their fidelity to fact, and touches them with the brush of the true artist just enough to give them coloring. It is a charming volume, and the reader who begins it will hardly lay it down until it is finished.—Boston Traveller.

An admirable book. Mrs. Custer was almost as good a soldier as her gallant husband, and her book breathes the true martial spirit.—St. Louis Republic.

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A book of adventure is interesting reading, especially when it is all true, as is the case with "Boots and Saddles." ... Mrs. Custer does not obtrude the fact that sunshine and solace went with her to tent and fort, but it inheres in her narrative none the less, and as a consequence "these simple annals of our daily life," as she calls them, are never dull nor uninteresting.—Evangelist, N. Y.

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TRANSCRIBER'S NOTE:

Minor changes have been made to correct obvious typesetter errors; otherwise, every effort has been made to remain true to the author's words and intent.

THE END