recall, and I
conscientiously believe this to be strictly accurate. Shall I read it?"

A severe and prolonged fit of coughing delayed her reply; and when she
held out her hand for the paper, her breathing was painfully rapid and
labored.

"I will not tax you. Let me glance over it."

Spreading the long sheets open before her, she leaned over the table
and read.

In the palm of her right hand rested her temple, and the left smoothed
and turned the leaves. Crossing his arms on the top of the table, the
attorney bent forward and surrendered himself to the coveted delight of
studying the face, that had made summary shipwreck of his matrimonial
fortune. No slightest detail escaped him; the burnished locks curled
loosely around the forehead smooth as a sleeping baby's, the broad arch
of the delicately-pencilled black brows, the Madonna droop of the lids
whose heavy sable fringes deepened the bluish shadows beneath the eyes,
the straight, flawless nose, the perfect chin with its deeply-incised
dimple, the remarkably beautiful mouth, which despairing grief had
kissed and made its own.

Pale as marble, the proud, patrician face was pure as some bending lily
frozen on its graceful, rounded stem: and the tapering fingers with
daintily curved, polished nails would have suited better the lace and
velvet of royal robes than the rough home-spun sleeves folded back from
the white wrists.

Mr. Dunbar had met many lovely, gracious, high-bred women, yet escaped
heart whole; and even the nobility and sweetness of his pretty fiancee,
enhanced by the surrounding glamour of heiresship, failed to touch the
flood gates of tender love that a pauper's hand had suddenly unloosed,
to sweep as a destroying torrent through the fair garden of his most
cherished hopes. What was the spell exerted by the young convict when
she grappled his heart, and in the havoc of her own life carried down
all the possibilities of his future peace? Personal ambition,
calculating mercenary selfishness had melted away in the volcanic
madness that seized him, and to his own soul he acknowledged that his
dominant and supreme wish was to gather in his arms and hold forever
the condemned woman, who wore with such sublime serenity the livery of
felony.

After all, have we misread our classics? Had not Homer a prevision of
the faith that Aphrodites' altar belonged in the Temple of the Fates?

Beryl refolded the paper and looked up. In the face so close to hers,
she