warn me that I must keep my heart free and in vacant loneliness,
because that, after many years, you were to come and lift me from my
obscurity?'

'Then, upon your own showing, you acknowledge that there was once
another upon whom your eyes loved to look?' he cried, half gladdened
that he had found even this poor excuse to transfer the charge of blame
from himself. 'And how can I tell but that you have met with him since?'

'I have met him since,' she quietly answered, driven to desperation by
the cruel insinuation.

In his heart attaching but little importance to such childish affections
as she might once have cherished, and having had no other purpose in his
suggestion than that of shielding himself from further inquiry by
inflicting some trifling wound upon her, Sergius had spoken
hesitatingly, and with a shamefaced consciousness of meanness and
self-contempt. But when he listened to her frank admission--fraught, as
it seemed to him, with more meaning than the mere naked words would, of
themselves, imply, an angry flush of new-born jealousy overspread his
features.

'Ha! You have met him since?' he exclaimed. 'And when, and where? And
who, then, is this fortunate one?'

AEnone hesitated. Now, still more bitterly than ever before, she felt the
sad consciousness of being unable to pour out to her husband her more
secret thoughts and feelings. If she could have told, with perfect
assurance of being believed, that in so lately meeting the man whom she
had once imagined she loved, she had looked upon him with no other
feeling than the dread of recognition, joined to a friendly and sisterly
desire to procure his release from captivity and his restoration to his
own home, she would have done so. But she felt too well that the
once-aroused jealousy of her lord might now prevent him from reposing
full and generous trust and confidence in her--that he would be far more
likely to interpret all her most innocent actions wrongly, and to
surround her with degrading espionage--and that, in the end, the
innocent captive would probably be subjected to the bitterest
persecutions which spite and hatred could invent.

'I have met him,' she said at length, 'but only by chance, and without
being recognized or spoken to by him. Nor do I know whether I shall ever
chance to meet him again. Is this a crime? Oh, my lord, what have I done
that you should thus strive to set your face against me? Do you not, in
your secret soul, know and b