talk alone
with me while they are at the fishing. He is not much to suspect, and
he was always fond of you and trusted you; but it is not doing right by
Gurdon."

Her eyes looked infinitely sorrowful into his; blushes, like pain, dyed
her cheeks.

"O Vesty, my pure one!--then tell me that you love me still--love me as
you used to do--and I'll go away content, and not come any more. Touch
my head as you used to do; kiss me once more, with those words, and----"

The baby's white, sleeping palm pressed hard against the mother's
burning cheek.

"Such words must not be any more, Notely. Go away and be the good,
powerful man God meant you to be, and I shall love you more than I ever
did in my life."

"Saint Vesta! I have lost you!" said Notely: his voice shook with
passion; the thin, strong hand that he put up, as if shading his eyes,
hid wild and angry tears.

"I have been faithfully engaged in the career to which you so tenderly
and considerately dedicated me," he went on. "What will you have? I
worked last winter like a dog; nothing is easy won, I think: but there
is no young man in this State who has been so flattered with public
notice as I. I am making my own money--no young man more shrewdly,
they say. What will you have? I have growing fame, prosperity, an
accomplished society woman for my wife. Was not that what you wished
for me?" His words stung.

Vesty had her dim look; she had turned cold; her speech groped
pitifully. "But I think I saw--I think I understood a little, after
all--because I loved you--what are you doing it _for_, Notely?"

"Ah, there, indeed!--what for? I have lost my object, you know, Saint
Vesta. For fame and frolic and the devil, I suppose--since we are
talking face to face with an immortal Basin--and to fill up the time
generally."

"I am glad that I did what I did," cried the poor girl, her tongue
touched with sudden fire, as if from outside herself; "you loved me a
little, but you did not love me much!"

"Ah!" he caught his breath, his deep eyes thrilled her.

"If you had loved me much--such a man as to be true to me through hard
work and time and sorrow and all--then you could not have borne to be
any less a man, Notely Garrison, though you lost me, or whatever you
lost. But if anything could turn you from _that_, then time and trial
and all would have turned you, sooner or later, to be unkind and untrue
to me. I know it. Before God, I know it! You loved me a