ts in
themselves may be, as in this case, irreparable. Your father is gone,
but I stand in his place, there is no one else to stand in it."

Her tears began to fall. And she let them fall--in silence. The earl
resumed.

"But for that extraordinary letter, I should have supposed you had been
actuated by a mad infatuation for the cur, Levison; its tenor gave the
matter a different aspect. To what did you allude when you asserted that
your husband had driven you to it?"

"He knew," she answered, scarcely above her breath.

"He did not know," sternly replied the earl. "A more truthful, honorable
man than Carlyle does not exist on the face of the earth. When he
told me then, in his agony of grief, that he was unable to form even
a suspicion of your meaning, I could have staked my earldom on his
veracity. I would stake it still."

"I believed," she began, in a low, nervous voice, for she knew that
there was no evading the questions of Lord Mount Severn, when he was
resolute in their being answered, and, indeed she was too weak, both
in body and spirit, to resist--"I believed that his love was no longer
mine; that he had deserted me, for another."

The earl stared at her. "What can you mean by 'deserted!' He was with
you."

"There is a desertion of the heart," was her murmured answer.

"Desertion of a fiddlestick!" retorted his lordship. "The interpretation
we gave to the note, I and Carlyle, was, that you had been actuated by
motives of jealousy; had penned it in a jealous mood. I put the question
to Carlyle--as between man and man--do you listen, Isabel!--whether he
had given you cause; and he answered me, as with God over us, he had
never given you cause; he had been faithful to you in thought, word and
deed; he had never, so far as he could call to mind, even looked upon
another woman with covetous feelings, since the hour that he made you
his wife; his whole thoughts had been of you, and of you alone. It is
more than many a husband can say," significantly coughed Lord Mount
Severn.

Her pulses were beating wildly. A powerful conviction that the words
were true; that her own blind jealousy had been utterly mistaken and
unfounded, was forcing its way to her brain.

"After that I could only set your letter down as a subterfuge," resumed
the earl--"a false, barefaced plea, put forth to conceal your real
motives, and I told Carlyle so. I inquired how it was he had never
detected any secret understanding between yo