I withdrew my hand suddenly, unbent my arm, and leaning over the intervening chair side, put it round the low exquisite waist and tried to draw her towards me. But this most irritating of women resented immediately that which she had just invited.

"You must not!" she said, vehemently, trying with both hands to disengage her waist from my arm, her face changing uncertainly from white to scarlet, her eyes meeting mine with a fugitive alarm, which nearly, but not entirely, overwhelmed a furtive transitory look of pleasure at the contact.

I had not mistaken her, I thought, she was both weak and sensual. I must conquer the first quality, and seduce the second, and the battle was won. But it was hard to prevent my own self-command slipping from me, and if I did not keep that, my real object would be lost in this useless sort of coquetry, or possibly a quarrel. I wanted all my own judgment—and it was difficult to summon it and keep it—to tell me exactly how far to push matters to excite her, without driving her to get up and leave me altogether.

"Nonsense!" I said, looking down into the changing face and on to the heaving, panting bosom; "if we are engaged, you know, I have a right to do much more than put my arm round your waist."

"Right!" she repeated, scornfully, "there is no right except what I choose! Take your arm away!"

"Listen to me," I said quietly, paying no heed to her request, except to tighten my clasp just so much as I dared.

Such a waist it was, yielding, supple, and warm; it was maddening to have to restrain the muscles in my arm and regulate their pressure. The blood went to my brain, and it was with a severe effort I collected my thoughts.

"You say," I continued, "that I must not go. Lucia, there is only one single condition on which I will stay."

"What is it?" she murmured.

She had ceased to resist my arm now. The colour was hot in her face, and her eyes confused.

"That you name some definite and definitive date for our marriage."

"This question again! How you do torture me! It worries me to have to think about it!"

"I know, dearest; that is why I say, settle something, and don't think about it any more."

"How can you be so absurd!" she answered, leaning her head back against the chair, and averting her soft, flushed face as far from me as she could, so successfully that there was little view of anything except the white throat and under-part of her chin as she strained her head back from me.

"Please let things go on as they are."

The words were a positive entreaty, but they fell upon ground where passion had blocked access to any of the tenderer, impersonal feelings. I only felt a rage of impatience as I heard her.

"No, dearest," I said very gently; "that is just what they cannot do;" and I looked at the swelling neck with the faint blue veins visible in its transparency, and thought, "You must be my own, or I must cease to see you, otherwise I shall strangle you."

"I cannot stand this sort of thing any longer. Not even for you, Lucia, can I run the risk of losing the little brains I possess, which is extremely likely to happen if I let things, as you say, go on as they are."

"Why?" she said, fretfully, turning her head from side to side. "What do I do to you?"

I did not answer this, but I raised myself so that I could look into her face, and our eyes met. She flushed crimson, and did not repeat the question.

"You will kill me if you worry me like this!" she said, evasively, and she did actually look very ill at the moment.

"My sweet, why do you not trust me with the cause of all this hesitation? Are you afraid of me, or do you misunderstand me? Lucia, the woman I have once loved is the woman I must always love. Whatever had happened, whatever she had done, whatever I had heard of her or from her, I should love her still. Has anything occurred since you were with me in Paris that you are afraid to tell me of? Has anyone else come between us? If so, tell me. I shall understand everything. If there is anything to forgive, I will forgive everything. I swear there is nothing that can make any difference to my love for you."

Lucia looked me steadily in the face now. A contemptuous smile curved her lips, all the confusion died out of her eyes, and they filled with a limitless arrogance and self-reliance. I had my answer in her face. It was the face of a woman whose virtue is absolutely invulnerable, and whose honour is unshadowed, and who has suffered too acutely in the maintenance of both to hear the faintest hint of weakness without a smile. A fierce, delighted satisfaction ran through me before she spoke.

"What do you insinuate, Victor?" she said, lightly, but with pointed directness. "That I have been in love with two men at the same time? No; nothing of my own will nor my own action stands between us. Forgive, forsooth!" and she gave a delightful, mocking laugh.

"You are the person to be forgiven, if anybody, for inflicting this year upon me! Now, I ask you to wait a little and you won't!"

"Because I don't see any adequate reason," I returned. "Last year I told you mine, now I demand yours."

I kept my arm round her, and could feel the pulses in her waist throb under it, but I turned my eyes away from her and stared fixedly at the carpet, waiting for her to speak, with the best patience I could command.

"I have told you till I am tired of telling you I must get better first," she said, pettishly.

"But you are not getting better," I persisted.

"On the contrary, all these four months you have been getting steadily worse."

So long a silence followed this that I looked into her face again suddenly, the lips were quivering, and the eyes brimming with tears. She turned her head away, but not before I had seen them.

"Dearest, would you rather I released you from your promise to me?" I said, bending nearer over her. "Do you wish that?"

One single, violent sob shook the lovely breast beneath me and swelled the throat.

"No," she said, passionately; "you know I don't!"

"There is no alternative between that or our marriage," I said, quietly.

I was not trying to be inflexible, nor to harden my heart against her. It was hardened by passion, which at no time is an inspirer of tenderness, and mine had been sufficiently irritated through four months of alternate excitation and resistance to be determined now. My difficulty was not to avoid being too tender, but to check myself from being too harsh. Had I heard my own words in cool blood they might have seemed hard, and my insistence inconsiderate and blamable, but my calm was only artificial, and my judgment little else than a blind clinging to the object with which I had come.

"Why can't you go away for a time and then we can marry later, when you come back?" she answered, in a weak, evasive tone.

"It is not wholly a question of being away from you," I returned. "So long as I am engaged to you, Lucia, my whole life is totally different from that which it would be if I were not."

"I give you permission to lead any life you please," she said vehemently.

"Thank you!" I thought, sarcastically; "but your permission has nothing to do with it."

"It is useless to discuss the matter," I said aloud. "I cannot argue the point with you; I have said there is no third alternative."

"I think you are most unkind," and Lucia let two lovely arms and hands sink over the sides of the chair in gesture of weak despair.

I noticed, indifferently, that she was unnaturally pale.

"If you consent to our marriage, Lucia," I urged, pressing that alluring waist, "I will promise this, if it will simplify matters—you shall continue to live as if you were unmarried until you yourself put things on another footing."

She glanced at me quickly, as I spoke, with an unexpressed surprise.

"Then what would you gain?" she said, coldly, and the unveiled cynicism in the words went home.

I flushed.

"The certainty," I answered, briefly. "This indefinite state of things is simply intolerable."

She was silent for a second; then she said violently, the scarlet flowing over her face up to her eyes—

"No! It would be impossible to maintain such relations as those after marriage, and you know it! That is quite out of the question!"

I merely shrugged my shoulders in silence.

"I am waiting for your answer, Lucia," I said, after a few moments.

"And if I cannot give you one?"

"Then I leave town to-morrow morning."

She gave a fleeting glance into my face, and then suddenly burst into a passion of convulsive sobs and tears—sobs that seemed to tear her breast asunder, and tears that started in a blinding torrent, drenching her eyelids and eyelashes and pale cheeks.

"It is most unkind, it is horrible, it is cruel of you to press me in this way!" she sobbed, trying with both hot, trembling hands to push my arm away and to free herself from my clasp.

The sight of her tears hurt me, the pain stamped on the soft face, and the tumultuous rising and falling of her breast in those agonised sobs, reproached me, but the hurt and the reproach were dull. If she thought her tears would induce me to hesitate or to desist, she was wrong. They were to me simply a favourable sign of her weakness, and urged me to press my advantage. I felt instinctively that it would not do to fail now; having gone so far, I must go farther, and be successful. Probably I should be much sooner forgiven by Lucia herself. Nothing is less pardonable, either in love or war, than an unsuccessful attempt.

Her resistance was nothing but nervous folly and weakness, and I believed she herself would be glad to be forced to give it up. Besides, even if my reason had not told me all this, my own feelings would have been enough to make me relentless.

"You may cry," I thought, looking at her as she sobbed with her head strained away from me, "but before I go you shall speak."

"What is your decision?" I said.

"What am I to say?" she murmured, in a voice choked by tears.

"Promise me some fixed date."

"I can't—now—like this. I will tell you to-morrow."

"No; to-day. You have deferred it from week to week. You must tell me now."

Silence, broken only by the sound of tears.

I waited, determined not to lose my patience.

"Tell me," I repeated after a pause.

"Victor, you must lend me your handkerchief," she said, turning her streaming eyes towards me.

The tears rained down over her lips and chin, and fell on the silk collar round her neck. She could not take her own handkerchief from her pocket, sitting as she was with my arm round her. I drew out mine and dried the wet eyes, and then pressed the soft reluctant head against my shoulder. Once there, it remained, too weary to lift itself again.

"Tell me, dearest."

"What, Victor?"

"The date."

"What date?"

"The thirteenth of next month," I said, decidedly.

I felt a startled quiver shoot through her.

"Oh, I could not really settle it without—without—thinking."

"Yes, you can, and must."

"But I don't know how long that is."

"It is exactly three weeks from now."

"But why the thirteenth?"

"We must appoint some date, and that is when my book appears in Paris, that's all; but choose another, if you like."

"The thirteenth is unlucky."

"What do you gain by all this trifling, Lucia?"

Some slight accent of all the angry surge of feelings within me crept, perhaps, into my tone. She did not answer, but began to cry again, not passionately this time, but in a weak, enervated listlessness.

"You are most unkind, Victor!"

"Is it to be the thirteenth?"

"I never knew you to be like this before."

"May I count it as the thirteenth?"

Silence. I waited and glanced at the clock again. The whole morning had slipped away. I should infallibly be late for that luncheon, but I could not help it.

"Lucia!"

"What, Victor?"

"Is it the thirteenth?"

"I don't know."

"Then I tell you that it is."

Almost beside myself with irritation, and uncertain whether I most loved or detested her, I drew her violently round towards me, bent over her and pressed my lips on hers, wet, ice-cold, and quivering. If there is anything in magnetism, or power to subdue another's volition, it ought to have acted fully then. I myself was at that moment the incarnation of will. My whole system was bowed to the intense effort to make her, by force, say what I desired.

"Say yes," I insisted.

She struggled violently, and the lips fluttered dumbly under mine; her breast swelled against mine; her soft hand tried to push back my shoulder.

"Say it," and I pressed her lips harder.

Either the force of the stronger will, or mere passion—and I am inclined to think the latter—had its influence.

"Yes, then, yes," she said, in a faint convulsive murmur, that was only just audible, but with the whole accent of assent in it.

"You promise?"

"Yes, I promise, absolutely. Oh, let me go. I am suffocated."

I released her instantly. I had no desire to keep her now that the point was gained, and I did not believe from her character that once having spoken she would retract. She started up, rose from the chair apparently with difficulty, made a few steps as if to cross the room, staggered, and, before I could reach her, fell heavily her full length along the floor. Her head, with its soft mass of bright hair, struck the ground almost at my feet, the pale face, drenched with tears, turned upward to the light. God! what a brute I felt! What had I done? I felt as if I had struck her. The first impulse of tenderness towards her welled up over my passion and turned it to a desperate self-reproach. A second later, Mrs. Grant came into the room.

"What has happened?" she said quickly, and then, as her gaze took in Lucia's figure, she turned to me with a blaze of anger in her eyes. "What have you been saying?" she exclaimed. "I will not have these scenes, Victor! I shall forbid you to see her!"

She fell on her knees beside Lucia, and unfastened the collar of her dress, still wet and stained with tears.

"Shall I not lift her up?" I asked, and Mrs. Grant raised her face again to me, white with suppressed anger.

"No," she answered, curtly. "Will you kindly leave this room. Your presence here is not needed."

I looked towards the fallen figure on the rug. The light head and the stone-white face seemed to multiply into a thousand replicas, and eddy round me. I walked out of the room.

"It will never be," I thought over and over to myself as I went down the stairs.

I turned into the dining-room, and flung myself into an armchair and waited there. Everything but Lucia herself was forgotten. My consciousness seemed suspended almost as completely as hers. At last the door opened, and Mrs. Grant herself came in. She started on seeing me.

"You still here, Victor," she said coldly.

"How could I go?" I murmured. "Is she better?"

"Yes; she is better."

Mrs. Grant's face was white and composed, her tones like ice. I saw she was unwilling to trust herself to speak to me even.

"May I not speak to her for one minute?"

"Certainly not. Are you not satisfied with the mischief you have done already?" Her voice shook with suppressed indignation. "She tells me she has fixed the thirteenth for your marriage. So that is the subject you came to press to-day! I think your conduct is most disgraceful."

My attitude of mind was—I don't care two d—-s what you think. However, I merely said,—

"I think you do me an injustice. I did not mean to distress Lucia to-day; but what is the use of this sort of thing going on as it has been doing? I have offered to release her from the engagement if she wishes, and in that case, I should go away altogether. I don't see that to keep up our present relations is any benefit to either of us."

Mrs. Grant's eyebrows relaxed a little.

"Perhaps you are right, Victor," she said, with a sigh. "Only we must be careful, or we shall lose her altogether."

Her voice shook now with something that was not anger. I held out my hand.

"I will come in the evening," I said, gently, "to hear of her if I cannot see her. May I?"

Mrs. Grant smiled, we shook hands, and I went out. I walked absently up the pavement, and then stood looking out as absently for a hansom. Now I had pushed matters to the point, I had not delayed nor put off action in this case, and I had attained the object with which I had come, but somehow I did not feel so satisfied as I had anticipated I should when I came away victorious.

Things were so different now from what they had been a year ago, and as I stood there looking up and down for a crawler, above the noise of the London thoroughfare, her own words to me in Paris rang with terrible distinctness, that prophecy wrung from her in the agony of her woman's longing—"I shall never be your own."

I almost believed it now.

"Looks like it," I thought, as I hailed a coming crawler and got in.

I said nothing to the man, but I suppose he had noted my glance at my watch before I got into the cab, and, in the hopes of an over-fare, he began lashing his horse across the head and neck. It was this that roused me out of a gloomy reverie, and I pushed up the trap.

"If you touch that animal again I'll get out," I said, angrily, as the poor brute tossed his head from side to side.

"Beg pardin', sir! Thought you was in a 'urry, sir!" came through the roof.

"Drive decently, and don't think," I muttered, relapsing into my own thoughts, cutting as the lash on the chestnut's neck.

I had stopped the lash, but I could not stop my thoughts. After dinner that evening I went to see her again. In this I did not succeed. I was told she had already gone to bed, but she had left a message for me, and not a word was said about rescinding the promise that had been forced from her in the morning. On the whole I went away satisfied and relieved.

"She will be all right," I thought, "now she has once made up her mind. It is extraordinary; women seem to have as great an aversion to forming a decision as children have to taking medicine."

"What should I do with myself now?" I questioned, standing idly in the hot, dusty London street. It was too early for me to go to bed, and I knew the pater would have turned in before I got back. I sauntered down two streets, and then drove to the Club. In the card-room I found Dick and two other fellows, one of whom was a stranger to me. As I made the convenient fourth, we played a rubber at whist. After this it seemed generally voted that the weather was too fatiguing for the strain of whist, and an adjournment was made to an open window, chairs, and drinks. I was preoccupied with my own thoughts, and I sat listening fitfully to the other men's gossip. Sometimes a sentence came to me; at one moment I was listening without hearing, the next I was hearing without listening. At last the phrase struck me—"Yes; dying horribly, like a rat of phosphorus."

I looked across to the man sitting opposite me. He was a young fellow, and I had gathered from to-night's conversation that he was studying medicine.

"Who is that?" I asked, with a sort of idle curiosity.

"Oh, only a fellow in the hospital," he answered with a cigarette between his teeth. "A paying patient. D. T., you know. I saw him last night in the ward. Shan't see him there to-morrow night, I expect," he added with a laugh, bringing down his rocking, tiled chair on its four legs, and determining at last to light the cigarette.

"You wanted to see the death, I thought," remarked Dick.

"I did; but, hang it, the fellow's been dying so long, my curiosity's worn out. However, I may come in for the show to-morrow morning if I am down at the hospital in time."

There was rather a cold silence after this remark, which made the young fellow look up and then add, hastily.—

"He's such an awful coward, you know, one can't feel much sympathy for him. 'Oh, it's so hard to die,' he goes on, 'at twenty-three! Can nothing save me? It seems so hard at twenty-three!' Well, I suppose no one does like going out, but still if a fellow knows he's got to"—

He paused. No one spoke for the minute, and then he went on,—

"Brought it on himself, too; I never saw a fellow so thoroughly knocked out! And now he does nothing but whine over it—'Oh, I'd do so differently if I had my time over again!' I said to him last night, 'Now, look here, Johnson, why don't you try and console yourself with thinking you enjoyed life at the time?'"

"Did you say Johnson?" I asked. "What is his Christian name?"

"Howard," he answered.

The two other men started, and looked at me. The speaker glanced at them, and then added hastily to me,—

"Do you know him?"

"Slightly," I answered, coldly.

He coloured.

"I am sorry if I"—

"Not at all," I said. "All that concerns him is quite a matter of indifference to me."

There was a pause, and then, by tacit mutual consent, the topic was not renewed. The men spoke of other things, and I sat in silence.

So Howard had killed himself—was dying in this way, like a poisoned rat. It was, as I had said, a matter of indifference to me. I did not feel one pulse of sorrow or regret. It is strange how completely and entirely these emotions of love, affection, friendship, hate expire, and leave no trace of their past existence.

I hear and read much of "lingering memories," "clinging remembrance," but for me the tender track of a past affection does not exist. He had, as I had told him, cut out our friendship by the roots, and I heard now of his approaching death as that of an absolute stranger.

I wondered idly where was that softening influence, and on what sort of natures did it act, that is supposed to survive all dead attachments, all broken friendships. Certainly, according to tradition, it seemed as if I ought now to feel some sort of emotion at hearing the fate of a man who had once held so large a share of my affections.

There ought to have been some touch of sentimental sadness in my thoughts, some recollections of first days together, and so on. But there was none. By that night's work he had made himself as nothing to me henceforward.

I wondered in a desultory way whether the sudden complete annihilation of an emotion in the human heart in this way showed the hardness of the heart, or the magnitude of the offence, or the poor quality of the emotion itself; and then I was roused by Dick's voice saying Good-night to the other fellows, and he and I were left by the window alone.

He looked across at me, and said.—

"If you would like to see Howard, I believe Thompson could get you admission any time."

His voice was low and sympathetic.

I raised my eyebrows and said,—

"What should I want to see him for?"

Dick looked surprised, and then said, hesitatingly,—

"Surely you were very great friends at one time!"

I laughed.

"Yes," I answered, "but there is a great deal in that at one time!"

A few days later my father pointed out the announcement of Howard's death in The Times as we sat at breakfast.

I nodded.

"Yes; I heard at the Club he was dying."

"What was it? They don't say here."

"No," I said; "they would not."

"What was it?"

"Excess."

We neither said anything further with reference to it, but Howard's death was in both our thoughts, and as we got up from the table he said, suddenly,—

"There's a great thing in having a quiet, moderate nature, or at least self-control," and then he added afterwards, as if struck by a sudden amending thought, "Well, of course, that comes virtually to the same thing."

"Does it?" I thought. "By Jove, not to the man himself!"

"Would you think, then," I asked, with a smile, looking across the rug at him as we stood by the fire, "that the existence of a lion-tamer was quite the same as that of a maiden lady who kept cats?"

He laid down his paper suddenly and stared at me.

"I don't understand—I—you don't mean that you"—

"I mean," I said, "that it's extremely difficult to see the best course. Howard has just died, raving mad, for giving way to his impulses; I may die, raving mad, for controlling mine."

He looked at me apprehensively. "I am sorry, Victor, if—You don't think you have overworked, do you?"

I laughed as I met his eyes scanning my face anxiously for traces of the possible insanity.

"No; none of the slates are loose at present," I said. "That's all right, but I am seedy altogether; out of sorts all round—that's all."



CHAPTER VII.

One unbroken flood of golden sunlight lay like a fallen silken veil over the points and peaks of the downs, over the swelling sides and the soft rolling dip of the valley, and the still September blue stretched cloudless overhead. It was the late afternoon of the thirteenth, a day that had been hot, oppressive, stifling in town, but here was simply warm, still, and tranquil.

All through the early hours of the day a parallel—if one may use the idea—oppression to the heat in the stirless air had weighed upon me. We had been married that morning, and before the ceremony my one sensation had been that of strain, during it tense anxiety, and afterwards reproach, and none of these are pleasant emotions. When I looked back to the morning, now, it seemed to be in the far distance; I don't know why, but ages seemed to have elapsed in the hours of this day.

Lucia had come up to the altar, her face whiter, more absolutely colourless than the veil over it, and my heart sank with apprehension as I first caught sight of her. Never, except in death, and already with the coffin enclosing it, have I seen a face so pallid. She walked steadily—she was a woman who always walked well, as a swan swims well, by nature—and the graceful figure passed on calmly towards us.

She kept the lids drooped over her eyes, and her white lips were closed firmly in repose. It seemed like a statue moving, and for a second I felt as if the church, the people, she, I, the whole scene were unreal, and my own blood changing into stone. The next second she was beside me, and then she suddenly lifted her eyes.

They glowed upon me as if there were actual fire stirring in the lustrous black pupils, and they gave back the joyous beat to my pulses, and sent my blood flowing onward again. The glance made us both human directly. But how anxious I felt all the time. Would she faint? I asked myself, desperately, over and over again. The colour of her face was terrifying, and the hand she gave me for the ring was cold as the touch of snow, and trembled convulsively. How long it all seemed! and how I loathed the prayers and the hymns, and sickened at the address! What earthly good is it to match words against a man's passion? As it is, it is, and no admonitions will alter it. However, all was over at last, and we were in the vestry. Lucia could not write her name; she tried, for no woman had less affectation and more self-command than she had, but the tremulousness of the fingers would not be controlled, and the mere effort agitated her so that she fell back in the chair, quivering, till each point of lace in her dress shook, and every eye could see the violent heart-beats under her bodice.

"Don't sign it, dearest!" I exclaimed, feeling like a murderer as I looked into the blanched, nervous face, and widely-dilated eyes.

There was a blank pause for a moment of sympathy and apprehension, as her shaking hand dropped the pen, and then the clergyman picked it up and finished the half-written name. I felt a sharp self-reproach, and Dick did not mend matters as he turned from her to me and said, in an indignant mutter,—

"She is not in a fit state to be married at all, Victor!"

He looked at me as if I were committing a crime, and I coloured and felt like a brute. Then there was the long breakfast, and the reception, and, as I say, it seemed as if centuries were rolling over my head in each five minutes, but now it was all done with; the burden of other's society had slipped from us, and the weight of my own oppression I seemed to have left, together with the sullen heat of town air. In all the journey down Lucia had been recovering. The scarlet had been coming back to her lips, and as the first breath of air came to us, straight from the heart of the smiling, sun-lit valley, they parted in a laugh, the light leapt up in the soft azure eyes, the rose-colour under the skin, and she bent forward to me and said, impulsively,—

"Victor, if you want to know, I feel perfectly happy!"

"And I, too, you darling!" I said, smiling back into the brilliant face.

"It seems quite a new thing to feel. I don't ever remember feeling happy until now, and I am five-and-twenty. Think, a whole third of an ordinary lifetime passed before I have known it!"

I laughed.

"Well, you are going to begin now, at any-rate," I said.

"Yes; I think so," she answered, both the carmine lips still curved in smiles. "But still it is late to begin. It is not wise; one should begin at fifteen—ten years back."

"Begin what?" I said, laughing.

"To be happy."

"By all means," I answered. "Begin as soon as you get the chance; but I think most people do. Only it is the chance that is generally wanting!"

"I don't know," Lucia said, looking away from me through the window, where the flying sunny slopes of the valley sped by. "People muddle away their chances of happiness in life. Ten years ago, when I was fifteen and you were twenty—well, we might have married then, and felt all that we feel now a whole ten years ago, which I have passed without a single happy day."

A shade of sadness came into the eyes, and darkened them as she spoke.

"But why do you think of that now?" I asked. "It is no use. The ten years have gone beyond recall, and, if you have not been happy, you have something to show for the time. You have been working."

"Yes," Lucia repeated; "I have been working."

There was silence. I hoped I had recalled to her thoughts the great canvas that stood complete in her studio. For myself, I knew that the keenest touch of pleasure that stirred my frame now was held in the ever-present thought that this day saw the birth of my work in Paris. Not for worlds would I have hinted this to Lucia. To have breathed a word that assigned even a part of my pleasure at the moment to anything but the possession of herself was the last thing that I would have done.

Every pleasure is kin to every other, and they each tend to enhance and strengthen another, so that in reality this inner pleasure of my thoughts that reverted constantly to the Paris publishers was no enemy, not even a rival, but rather a coadjutor of the passionate, personal pleasure in the woman beside me. The brain already intoxicated with one pleasant emotion lends itself more, not less, readily to another, just as a brutal lover inflames his love with wine. In precisely the same way, my passion for Lucia was inflamed by the wine of gratified ambition. All the same, I said nothing touching on the book for fear lest she should misunderstand me, nor hinted—that which I felt myself—that this scene put back ten years, when I was full of vague ambitions and unaccomplished plans, would not have possessed the zest it had for me now.

Man, unfortunately, is not the desirer of one thing at a time, but of many things, and the gratification of a single desire is not enough to content him. If a person is both hungry and thirsty, you cannot satisfy him, however kindly you may supply him with bread. Another line of thought that ran side by side with this in my brain, as I watched the shadow pass over the girl's face as she thought of her ten lost years, was, that had we had these sensations at fifteen and twenty they would certainly not have out-lasted us till now! But this also I would not say. The passing of our passions, however we may recognise it as philosophers, is not pleasant to us as lovers.

"Oh! there is our house, I believe!" said Lucia, suddenly, as we neared the station.

"Yes; you can just see it from the line, I know," I answered, looking through the window. "What a glorious evening!"

All before our eyes lay in the still, liquid golden light, and through the burnished haze that seemed to slope obliquely between us and it we saw the square white house, lying a little blow the level of the line, and all but hidden behind a delicate, intricate profusion of light green foliage. Behind it rose a rolling slope, clothed half-way up with a copse of young larch trees, whose slender stems sent long shadows down the whole length of its side, falling across the sun-baked, waving, brown-and-yellow grasses, and the red cows, lying lower down the slope, drowsy, as all else seemed in the mellow sunlight.

At the side of the house stretched a lawn, shaded-in from the carriage drive by a fringe of larch and spruce, and on this lawn, innocent of tennis-courts and similar abominations, were planted here and there single trees. It had been the fancy of the owner that not one of these on the lawn should be indigenous, and almost every country out of Europe was represented by one lovely forest denizen.

The crytomera, the cedar of Japan, raised its delicate rosy crest here under the blue of an English sky; a young Turkish cypress shot like a dart from the ground and threw its narrow shadow straight as a spear across the emerald turf; and farther on a small squat tree, from China, unfurled smooth, glossy, polished leaves of lightest green, and thick-lipped succulent scarlet flowers, indolently to the kiss of the British sun. We caught a passing glimpse of it, and Lucia drew in her breath softly, with pleasure.

"How lovely! What a pretty house, Victor!" she said.

"Yes; I know it is supposed to be a very charming place."

"And don't you think so, too?" she asked, turning to me, and the side light from the window caught the curly hair under the velvet hat brim and turned it into gold.

"I haven't got a very keen artistic eye, Lucia, I think. Certainly not for houses," I answered, laughing, and looking straight into those eyes of lapis lazuli and then away. "But I adore this one, as it is going to give me the happiest hours in my life!"

And I met her eyes. A slow flush mounted into Lucia's face, and then she seemed to tear her gaze from mine with difficulty and turned to the window, so that I could not see her face; her ear, however, betrayed her all the same, for the painful blush reached even there, and flooded its white, pink-tinted porcelain with scarlet.

A second after, the train was at a standstill, drawn up at the platform of the station. It was very quiet, and even the train coming in hardly seemed to disturb the sleepy stillness that hung over the strips of asphalt, the beds of hollyhocks and lilac bushes against the whitewashed walls, where the rural fancy of the stationmaster had gone so far as to range a row of straw bee-hives.

There were few passengers by the train, and little luggage except our own. The single porter, the stationmaster, some workmen, and a few market women, with white aprons and baskets of eggs on their arms, stared wonderingly at Lucia as she stood with the golden sunlight pouring down upon her light hair and brilliant face, and the glory of Parisian fashion embodied in her dress.

My friend's carriage had come to meet the train, and I left her for a moment to speak to the footman about our luggage. As I walked back up the platform she was standing three-quarter ways towards me, the attitude which displays best that most alluring line in a woman's figure, the line from under the arms to the waist.

In Lucia it was specially striking, not straight, but like the back of a Z, a sharp, smooth slope to the low waist, and formed a perfect harmony with the two curves of the hips, and the long fall of the skirt beneath. All my frame—every limb and muscle—quickened with keen pleasure as my eye met the familiar lines, as yet familiar to one sense only, and then followed the inevitable, involuntary rush of exultant remembrance of my absolute possession now.

I let it come and flood my brain with a half-drunken satisfaction, and the phrase formed itself on my lips, "Well, hang it, my to-morrow has come at last!" As I came up to her I saw her eyes were fixed upon me with a searching gaze. I thanked heaven Lucia was not one of the horrible, modern women, if indeed they exist outside a lady's novel, who are always analysing you and your emotions, and testing the depth of your inferiority to themselves. I believed she was only studying and weighing my outer appearance, of which I was far more confident than of the inner personality. So I met the blue, soft-shaded eyes in the flare of the sunlight without embarrassment, and smiled back into them as I joined her.

"Well, darling, now come," I said; "I think I have made that idiot understand your hand-bag is not to be shaken!"

Lucia pushed a little pale gloved hand through my arm, impetuously, and said, as we turned to follow the decline of the platform towards the carriage,—

"Victor! you are so good-looking!"

I laughed. I was right, then. She had only been thinking of the exterior. What a comfort! A few steps had brought us to the carriage door, and the servant was holding it open. I waited to answer her till we had started, but when she had got in, and I had followed, she threw herself back on the cushions and put one hand on my shoulder, and before I could speak she went on in a low voice,—

"Yes! It is very charming now, of course; but all the same you have nearly killed me!"

The words were spoken with such a bitter, tremulous vehemence, that I turned and looked at her in startled silence. Her eyes still passed keenly backwards and forwards over my face.

"Oh, yes! if you knew one-tenth of what I have suffered this last year! how I have coveted—longed. It doesn't matter what I say to you now, does it! Oh, I am so glad that all this terrible repression and restraint is done away with, and that we are free to do and say what we like! I am so glad I am your wife at last!"

The trembling, excited accents, springing straight from her thoughts, and poured into my ear from her warm, parting lips, stirred my own tolerably well-governed feelings to a painful intensity, and I felt only too sharply that I, at any rate, had not done with self-restraint. I said nothing. I was rendered dumb by the riot within me, but I pushed my arm round her waist and drew her against me.

The violence and want of tenderness in the action pleased her, perhaps, being a woman. The waist yielded gladly, and the whole form sank against me with relaxed and satisfied pleasure.

We neither of us spoke again until the carriage drew up between the bright green of the larches, stabbed through with long shafts of light, and before the shallow steps and open windows of the house. On each side of the steps stood, not classic urns to remind one irresistibly of graveyards, but honest, bright, terracotta, human-looking flower-pots, from which rose or trailed the loveliest plants a skilful gardener could wrest from September. A white peacock paced majestically across the red gravel towards the larches, and underneath these, swinging exuberantly on suspended perches, with the strips and bars of sunlight flashing on their glittering feathers, chattered together nearly a dozen Oriental parrots.

Lucia looked at the scene with an artist's quick eye, and I heard an instinctive murmur about its making a pretty sketch.

I told her she would be otherwise occupied now than in making sketches, and we both laughed as we passed up the steps together.

In the hall hovered, like two evil shadows, her maid and my valet, lying in wait for us to remind us of clothes and the serious duties of life. I saw Lucia carried off from me with despairing eyes, knowing it would be ages before I saw her again.

It did not take me long to get into another suit, and then I returned to the dining-room, and roamed about from end to end, too restless to sit down to glance at the papers that lay on the different tables, or even to light up a cigar. I walked about aimlessly, longing for the woman's presence beside me again.

It was a very large room—two, properly, knocked into one—with a window looking to the front and the carriage-drive, and another at the side, opening, with French glass doors, on to the low stone terrace which overlooked the lawn.

Through these I wandered at last on to the terrace, and rested my arms on the low balustrade, looking with unseeing eyes across the lawn, with its tropical trees standing motionless in the golden haze. Everything around me was very still, and a peculiar strained calm seemed to be upon me also—the calm of an intense desire, hushed and expectant, in all the blood.

A swift, hurried step came on to the terrace, and I turned instantly.

The light fell all over her, the living incarnation of my long drawn out hopes and dreams. She had changed her dress to a light dinner-silk. The bodice was modest—I mean by that, it was unobtrusive—very. Excess of nervous excitement, the wealth of evening sunlight, and her fashion of dressing made her dazzling to look upon, and I stood for a second in silence.

She misunderstood my pause and glance, and a rush of hot colour came into her face, and the tears suddenly started to her eyes.

"You don't like my dress," she exclaimed. "I told Celine she was cutting it too low!"

A step forward and I had her in my arms. Ah! what were dreams to the keen, sharp delight of feeling her there—alive, and in the flesh—throbbing and pulsating against me? I declared the dress was perfect, that I would not have the bodice half an inch higher for anything, that she looked adorable, and so on, until she was comforted. The tears passed into laughter, and the flush died away; but she trembled against me distressingly, and her lips quivered nervously.

I held her to me, but she seemed to flutter uncertainly in my clasp, just as a bird flutters wildly without aim at the limit of its tethering cord, and when I released her she sank into the wire chair at our side with a look of exhaustion stamped on the soft, delicate face. I saw that it would require all my tact and care to make this evening a success, and I determined that it should be one for her. Standing there beside her, looking down on her light head, I made a rough, mental examination of my thoughts. I seized those that had anything of self in them, rolled them hastily together, and thrust them into an obscure corner of my brain out of hearing, to leave the better part of my love for her free to guide me.

I drew a chair close to her and sat down, letting my arm rest along the top rail of hers, behind the soft head, which, after a minute, sank gently back upon it with a movement of tired relief. We neither spoke, and the perfect, sunny calm of the evening air, the silence, and the physical rest seemed to soothe her. When the servant came on to the terrace to announce the dinner, she had recovered, and her arm on mine was warm and firm.

As soon as we had finished dinner, she rose restlessly from the table and looked at me with a hesitating air. I smiled back at her, but it hurt me inwardly this want of confidence, this lack of familiarity she seemed to have. This sort of hesitation before she made the simplest request, the start and flush when I spoke suddenly to her, this timidity of me now, hurt and puzzled me. I, who had taught my dog implicit trust, seemed to have missed the way with the woman.

I remembered Paris: my own harshness to her there came back upon me like a blow. The indelible impression of my hardness had been given then, and she dreaded it now. She had been conquered then; her will and desire had been broken down to mine; she had been forced to yield and to suffer; she had appealed to me and found me inflexible, relentless; and now I had the fruits of my victory. The woman I loved, though she might love me, feared me instinctively, as the once well-beaten dog ever afterwards fears its master.

To me, who hated victory, who loathed subduing others, and the price they bring of fear and shrinking, the realisation of her feeling towards me was like a sudden physical pain. I got up from the table feeling my face grow white with sharp distress. I hardly knew at the moment how to express my thoughts; besides, I knew words would be of no avail. An impression given is a scar upon the mind like a scar upon the flesh. She fixed her eyes on my face with a sort of apprehension in them, that was extremely bitter to me.

"What were you going to say, dearest?" I said, merely, with a faint smile; "go on."

"Oh, nothing much!" she said, hastily, flushing and paling almost in the same moment; "only I feel so restless. Come and show me all the rest of the house, will you?"

I assented, and we passed out of the dining-room into the hall and up the shallow flight of stairs. I put my right hand on the banister and my left arm round her waist, and the whole sweet figure beside me, and the white neck and ear so near me, drove out the thoughts of a minute back, and I only laughed as I felt her waist contract convulsively as I touched it.

"Would you like to take my arm better?" I said, mockingly, and drew her round to me so that the soft face was just beneath my own. In the subdued light of the staircase she lifted her lids, and I saw her eyes, gleaming and sparkling, brimming over with gaiety and pleasure, and the arm next me she raised and twisted close round my neck.

"No, Victor; here is the place for my arm now! You won't push it away as you did in Paris, will you?"

The words hurt cruelly. Could I never obliterate that wretched memory? It was vivid with her; it clung to me. It seemed a shadow dogging my present pleasure. I stopped suddenly on the staircase and took her wholly into my arms. All the supple form yielded at my touch, till it leaned hard against my own; the face, pallid with excitement, was raised to mine; the glitter of her eyes swam before my vision as I caught it from beneath the half-drooped lids; the lips, parted in a faint breath, then closed as mine joined them. As they touched, no consciousness was left except that both our lives seemed mingling, panting, fainting on our lips.

The pain that is pleasure, and the pleasure that is pain, thrilled and pierced every nerve as I held her and felt those lips under mine, her heart beat under my heart, her weak arms twisted round my throat. When at last my lips set hers free, on fire with the passion of my own, they moved in a half-delirious murmur,—

"Victor, you don't know how I love you!"

I have no distinct recollection of passing up the remaining stairs, but we did reach the landing, and a second or two later were standing in the drawing-room. I think she said it was pretty, and so on, but I hardly heard, my head was reeling, and all my senses dull, her figure leant a little against me, and the pressure of her arm was upon mine. After the drawing-room, the reading-room, and a breakfast-room, all opening from the same corridor, had been passed through, there were still two rooms unexplored on that floor. I turned the handle of the nearer door, and then pushed it open.

Lucia stepped on to the threshold, and then I felt her arm start violently in mine, and she drew back with a sharp, instinctive movement.

I looked down upon her and murmured,—

"Our room, dearest."

The colour blazed all over the fair skin, till it seemed scorching it, and tears startled into the dismayed eyes, which she turned from me confusedly, as she shrank back into the passage.

I was startled, and a chill seemed to fall upon me, and penetrate deeper as a grey pallor succeeded to the burning flush, and she had to lay one trembling hand on my arm again for actual support.

"Victor, it is nothing!" she said, hurriedly, forcing a smile to her lips.

"It—it—startled me."

She made a nervous step forward, as if she would have forced herself to enter the room with me, but I collected myself with a great effort, and gently drew the door shut.

"There is another sitting-room a little farther on; come and look at it," I said, quietly, in a light, indifferent tone, as if we were meeting in society for the first time.

I drew her on past the door, feeling her hand fluttering on my arm, and her feet uncertain beside my own. Inwardly I was alarmed—dismayed. Her extreme nervousness, and the physical effect upon her, frightened me. With crushing force and clearness came back to me the remembrance of the fearless, eager, unrestrained abandonment of body and mind, the gay exuberance of careless passion, with all the vigour of youth and health in it, that had leapt up to meet my caress a year ago,—and been refused. We passed on to a door on the other side of the corridor, which opened to another sitting-room. A lovely evening had given way to a lovelier night. Beyond the long window panes, set open to the still air, we caught sight of the sinking golden crescent of the moon towards the south; above and all round, to the low horizon, the sky was crowded, sparkling, and brilliant with stars. I moved two chairs close up to the open window, but she stood by the sill and leaned forward to the night air.

"You think me very silly?" she said, with her head turned away from me.

"I think you are not well, dearest," I said, gently.

There was silence. Words seemed frozen on my lips. A sort of terror filled me of exciting or embarrassing her. I stood beside the window frame watching her. After a minute or two she dropped back into a chair and looked up at me with a laugh.

"I think I am all right, only you startled me! By the way, Victor, if anything ever does happen to me, you will remember you have your work and your talent to turn to, won't you? I mean you would not do anything desperate. I want you to promise me that."

She lay back in the easy chair, burying her light head and polished white shoulder in the velvet cushion, and swinging one little foot idly as she looked up smiling for her answer. The bright light in the room fell full upon her, and I looked down upon this brilliant piece of life, full of glowing tints and warm pulses and subtle powers, and my brain flamed with the pleasure of the senses. I hardly noted her words.

"Dear little girl!" I said, smiling back into her eyes. "I refuse to think of such things at all!"

"Oh, well, it doesn't matter! I don't expect you would," she said, laughing, the colour leaping up in her cheeks, and the vivid blue deepening behind her lashes. "Come and make much of me now while you have got me."

Her whole face and form were instinct with a delicious invitation, and I bent down to and over her, filled with the delight of the moment. We made one chair do for both of us, and looked through the window at intervals to escape each other's eyes, and laughed at nothing, and talked a very extraordinary astronomy. At last, with her soft fingers in my hair and on my throat, and her white arm above the elbow clasped in my hand, speech, even laughter, grew choked in dense feelings for all the command I kept upon myself; and we sat in silence, hearing each other's breath, feeling each pulse that beat in the other's throat and breast.

There had been a long silence when the last star of Orion slid over the horizon, followed by my impatient eyes. I looked at my watch. I hardly know why I did it then. It was an involuntary action rather than a conscious one. I did not say anything as I replaced it, but she glanced sharply at me, and I saw her lips whitened.

I knew the intense excitement that was moving her, it spoke to me in every line of her form—in her eyes, torn wide open by it, in the faint gleam of sweat that showed on the white forehead. I was not blind to it, but the tumult within me, made all the greater by the sight of it, left me insensible to its danger for her.

She got up from where we were sitting, and began to walk restlessly round the table. I wheeled my chair slightly round so that I could watch her. Nothing struck me particularly as I did so except the extreme grace and attraction in the moving form. The heavy silk skirt dragged backwards and forwards over the carpet almost soundless, the moonlight and gaslight alternately gleaming on its folds. Each time that she came between me and the table my eyes followed with dizzy delight the soft side curve of her breast, the lines of the exquisite waist, the white idle hand that sometimes touched the edge of my chair arm, sometimes not, as she passed. One of these times I caught it and detained her, and looked up at her face, but the light was behind her, and only fell on the bright hair.

"Why do you walk about so?" I asked.

"I don't know. Victor, I feel very strange. I hope nothing is going to happen. I never felt quite like this before;" and she broke her hand loose from me and passed on.

I sprang up and followed her, and put my arm round her.

"Going to happen, dearest! What do you mean? Do you feel ill?"

I looked at her. She was very white, and her lips were parted and pale. There was a distressed and strangely absent look upon her face which startled me, though I had no clue to its significance.

"Yes, very ill," she answered, her eyes wandering away from my anxious ones looking down at her, as we stood for a moment together.

Then she gently pushed away my arm and continued her walk.

"You know my heart always does beat and hurt if I am very happy, or very excited, or any thing, but it's never been quite so bad as this before." And then, catching the distress upon my face, she added, "I daresay this is nothing. It will go off. I think it is only hysterical. Don't look so unhappy!" And a faint smile swept over her pallid face.

She made her way to the sideboard and drank some water standing there. Then she continued to move slowly round the room, both hands pressed beneath her left breast, and her delicate eyebrows contracted into one dark line across her colourless face.

"I overworked myself so tremendously just lately," she said, after a minute, "after—well, after I came to you in Paris. I shall take a long rest now. I hope I shall get strong again. When one is as delicate as this, life is not worth having."

And then, before I could answer, she stopped suddenly, and looked across the room at me with dilated eyes.

"Is there any brandy I could have?" she asked, abruptly.

My handbag stood in the corner of the room. There was a flask of brandy there. In two seconds I had got it out and was beside her with the traveling-glass half filled.

She took it with a fluttering, uncertain hand, and drank a little, but not even then did the colour come back to her lips—they were apart and grey. She set the glass down on the table with a wandering, undecided movement, and then turned towards me and linked two ice-cold hands round my neck,—

"Hold me up! I am sinking!" and her head fell heavily against my shoulder.

I clasped my arm firmly round her waist. I was startled, distressed, alarmed, but still, even then, I did not think there was any serious danger. I thought she was hysterical, as she had said; over-strained, and over-excited. I thought at most this was a fainting attack. I thought—God knows what I thought. I must have been blind.

She put her hand to her throat, and I saw she wanted air. Supporting her, I crossed to the window, and stood where the cool night breeze came blowing in upon her face. My hand followed hers to her bodice, and I loosened all the delicate lace ruffles round it that it had never been my privilege to touch till now, and that were no whiter than the lovely breast from which I unloosed them.

So we stood for a few seconds, her lids were drooped over her eyes. At intervals, it seemed to me, her heart gave great single, convulsive throbs that thudded through both our beings.

Then suddenly she tore her eyes wide open, and fixed them in an unreasoning agony upon me. A straining, fearful effort seemed in them. I pressed her to me.

"What is it, dearest?" I said quietly, trying to recall her to herself. "Why do you look at me so?"

"Because I cannot see you! I have lost my sight! Oh, Victor, I am DYING!"

The words were a strained cry of terrified anguish, and they cleft through my brain like the stroke of an axe. With blinding suddenness I knew then what was coming. My heart seemed turned into stone. Only Reason rejected the truth. The gong stood on the table close beside us. I stretched out my arm and struck it furiously, my eyes fixed in terror on her face. The Great Change was there; the shadow already of dissolution. The door was thrust open and a servant hurried in.

"A doctor!" I said to him, "quick for your life."

But I saw, before any doctor could reach us, she would have gone from me. I strained my arms round her.

"Speak to me, my darling, speak," I said wildly, raising the dying head higher on my breast.

Both her hands were clasped hard upon her heart. A frightful agony was reflected in the bloodless face, but for the moment death retreated.

"Victor! To think I am dying! I shall never paint again! Oh, don't let me go! Keep me! oh, keep me with you!"

My brain seemed bursting as I heard her. The only prayer of my life broke then in a frenzy from my lips, "Great God! spare her!"

"Hold me up! oh, keep me, Victor! I am dying."

"Dearest, you are fainting!"

There was no answer. Heavier and heavier the pressure grew on my breast, the arm slid heavily from my shoulders, the head fell slowly backwards on my arm. I looked into her eyes. They were black as I had seen them long ago in the studio. Fearfully, terribly dilated they were, and in their depths was that look as if the soul were listening to a far-off summons, calling, calling to it, to depart.

"My life! Speak to me once more! One word!"

Probably my voice did not reach her. For her already the silence held but that one imperious command. My brief rule of this spirit was over. It no longer heeded me. She no longer answered me. Her eyes were still fixed upon me in helpless horror, terror, and despair; but they knew me no longer. The unwilling soul had already started on its journey, and its earthly love was no more to it than its earthly form. I held her motionless, my eyes on hers, then I saw a glaze, a slow glaze fit upon them, they set in it, and it told me she was dead.

Without a struggle, without a spasm, without a deeper breath to mark the severance, her soul had drifted away from me, out of her body that I held in my arms. Without a farewell, without a word, without any knowledge of the second when the life had fled, without a sound beyond that despairing, terrified appeal to me to keep her. I stood rigid, petrified, my arms locked round her like iron bands. I heard the door open and steps. Then I saw the doctor before me. He gave one glance at the drooping head.

"Lay her down flat," he said.

I lifted her into my arms wholly, and walked through the door into the corridor to the opposite room—our room, and laid her on the bed. He followed me to the bedside and bent over her. I drew back and stood beside the curtain motionless. Everything was swaying before my eyes in darkened confusion. Was this my wedding night? There was the room, full of warm, shaded light; there was the bed, and on it a passive woman's figure, and another man bent over it and tore aside the bodice and unclasped the white stays.

I watched his hand part them and pass indifferently beneath them, and beneath the linen, and rest over the left breast and then beneath it. The shade grew colder on his face. There was an intense silence in the room, then the words came across it, "Quite extinct." My ears seemed to fill with sounds, the ground to rise upward, the bed to heave, and I went forward blindly and tore his hand from her breast and pushed him from the bed.

"Then go and leave us," I said, and I heard my own voice as from a great distance.

He looked at me, and his face and everything around was dark before my eyes.

"Will you kindly go out of this room?" I repeated, and he walked to the door.

I opened it, he passed out, and I shut and locked it, and came back to the bed. The weight of nerveless, passive beauty on it had crushed a depression in its whiteness, the head had sunk down sideways to the pillow as in tired sleep. Across the throat and breast, over and amongst the disturbed laces of her dress, and on the parted gleaming satin of her stays fell a flood of rose-coloured light. One shoulder rose from it and caught a shadow; another shade lay lower in the dimples of the elbow; the inside of the arm looked warm. The throat, the round soft throat, seemed glowing; the fallen head, the passive arms, the whole outstretched form seemed relaxed in the abandonment of sleep. Had I often seen her in my dreams like this? This was but the realisation of my dreams. I bent over her, then threw myself wildly upon the bed beside her, and drew her into my arms.

"Lucia! my Lucia!" The sweet face almost seemed to smile as I drew the head to me, and a soft curl of hair fell upon my arm as I pushed it round her neck and pressed her breast to mine. It came softly and unresistingly, just so much as my arm pressed it, with terrible compliance. The throat chilled through my arm to the bone, numbed it.

I laid my other hand upon her neck, pushed it lower till it rested above her heart, and enclosed one breast, nerveless, pulseless, and cold, colder than any snow. Slowly it chilled through my fingers. I smoothed one passive arm—how cold. Then my hand sought her waist, and my arm leant upon her hip—as once in Paris—and here the coldness held and froze me.

Through her silk skirt it penetrated; the damp, eternal coldness pierced through my quivering, living arm; it seemed dividing my veins like steel.

It was a dead woman that I clasped: a corpse. I strained my eyes down upon her face, that seemed but asleep.

"Lucia?"

And the word was one frenzied, senseless question; and the sweet mouth seemed to smile back, in its last eternal smile, my answer,—

"Yes, I am Lucia, and you possess me now."

Like a torrent dammed up for a moment, the flood of insensate, impotent desire flowed again, raging through all my veins, and engulfed me; my burning arms interlaced her, my weight pressed upon her, my trembling lips, full of torturing flame, sought hers, met, closed upon them in a frenzy of vain, fruitless longing and stayed—frozen there.

When I was hardly well from weeks of raving illness that followed, but yet well enough to walk and go about like a rational being, I went to the cemetery to see all that now remained to me beyond my own fearful memory. Dick was beside me. He had insisted on coming with me, and, when we reached the grave, he stood beside me at its edge, as he had stood beside me at the altar.

A huge slab of white marble lay horizontal upon the narrow, single grave. Fools! They should have made it a double one. A heavy iron chain, swinging great balls, studded with spikes, was linked from post to post round the tomb. At its head rose a cross, extending its arms against a background of cypresses.

I looked at it all with dry and savage eyes. The illimitable regret, the boundless, hopeless remorse for the irrevocable that has been shaped by our own heedless hands, the unspeakable yearning for that, once more, which has been freely ours and we have flung away, rose like a swelling tide within me, and rolled through me in thundering, deadening waves standing at her grave. I stared half blindly at the words on the stone—"Wife of V. Hilton." Wife! What a mockery!

I looked, and that slab of white marble—spotless and relentless—that barred her into the grave, seemed to my still half-unstable brain symbolical of that last year of virgin purity of life that had broken her strength to bear. That spiked iron linked round the helpless dust seemed like the chains of repression that had tortured and crushed the soft ardent nature. That arrogant cross, stretching its arms threateningly above the lonely tomb, seemed the cross upon which we had crucified—she and I—the desires of the flesh. And at its foot, I read,—"She sleeps to waken to a glad to-morrow." And then a bitter laugh burst from my lips.

"Who put that?" I asked. "Great God! that that word should follow me even here!"

Dick took my arm.

"We know nothing. There may be a to-morrow;" at which I merely laughed again.

"Wife of V. Hilton!" I repeated, reading from the stone. "If she had been, Dick, it would not have been so hard."

Dick said nothing. After a time he urged me to come away from the grave.

"Where? To what?" I asked him; and we both stood silent, gazing upon her cross.

* * * * *

Months have passed by, and Dick consoles me still, and tells me I shall refind the zest of life by and by, later on, in the future, to-morrow.

THE END