emory--the fatal truth returned to him.

Lose her? lose this? He looked up as if to ask God to confirm it.

The same sweet blue eyes! the eyes that he had often seen in the dying
glories of evening; on him they dwelt, shifting, and fluttering, and
glittering, but constant: the light of them as the light on a rolling
wave.

And true to him! true, good, glorious, as the angels of heaven! And his
she was! a woman--his wife! The temptation to take her, and be dumb, was
all powerful: the wish to die against her bosom so strong as to be the
prayer of his vital forces. Again he strained her to him, but this time
it was as a robber grasps priceless treasure--with exultation and
defiance. One instant of this. Lucy, whose pure tenderness had now
surmounted the first wild passion of their meeting, bent back her head
from her surrendered body, and said almost voicelessly, her underlids
wistfully quivering: "Come and see him--baby;" and then in great hope of
the happiness she was going to give her husband, and share with him, and
in tremour and doubt of what his feelings would be, she blushed, and her
brows worked: she tried to throw off the strangeness of a year of
separation, misunderstanding, and uncertainty.

"Darling! come and see him. He is here." She spoke more clearly, though
no louder.

Richard had released her, and she took his hand, and he suffered himself
to be led to the other side of the bed. His heart began rapidly throbbing
at the sight of a little rosy-curtained cot covered with lace like milky
summer cloud.

It seemed to him he would lose his manhood if he looked on that child's
face.

"Stop!" he cried suddenly.

Lucy turned first to him, and then to her infant, fearing it should have
been disturbed.

"Lucy, come back."

"What is it, darling?" said she, in alarm at his voice and the grip he
had unwittingly given her hand.

O God! what an Ordeal was this! that to-morrow he must face death,
perhaps die and be torn from his darling--his wife and his child; and
that ere he went forth, ere he could dare to see his child and lean his
head reproachfully on his young wife's breast--for the last time, it
might be--he must stab her to the heart, shatter the image she held of
him.

"Lucy!" She saw him wrenched with agony, and her own face took the
whiteness of his--she bending forward to him, all her faculties strung to
hearing.

He held her two hands that she might look on him and not spare the
horrible wo