s join our
loneliness and make of it a beautiful and happy home. Madeleine, I
have learned to love you deeply!"

His eyes glowed between their narrowing eyelids, his voice rang
changes upon chords of most exquisite tenderness; his whole manner was
charged with a courtly reverence mingled with the subtlest hint of
passion. Rupert as a lover had not a flaw in him.

Yet fear, suspicion, disgust chased each other in Madeleine's mind in
quick succession. What did he mean? How could it be that he loved her?
Oh! if _this_ had been his purpose, what motive was prompting him
when he divided her from her deceiving lover? Was no one true then?
Was this the inconsolable widower whose grief she had been so
sympathetically considering all the morning; for whose disinterested
anxiety and solicitude on her behalf her sore heart had forced itself
to render gratitude? Oh! how terrible it all was ... what a hateful
world!

"Well, Madeleine?" he pressed forward and slid his arm around her.

All her powers of thought and action restored by the deed, she
disengaged herself with a movement of unconscious repulsion.

"Cousin Rupert, I am sure you mean kindly by me, but it is quite
impossible--I shall never marry."

He drew back, as nonplussed as if she had struck him in the face.

"Pshaw, my dear Madeleine."

"Please, Cousin Rupert, no more."

"My dear girl, I have been precipitate."

"Nothing can make any difference. That I could never marry you, so
much you must believe; that I shall never marry at all you are free to
believe or not, as you please. I am sorry you should have spoken."

"Still hankering after that beggarly scoundrel?" muttered Rupert, a
sneer uncovering his teeth betrayed hideously the ungenerous soul
within. He was too deeply mortified, too shaken by this utter
shattering of his last ambitions to be able to grasp his usual
self-control.

Madeleine gave him one proud glance, turned abruptly away, and walked
into the house.

She went steadily up to her room, and, once there, without hesitation
proceeded to unlock a drawer in her writing-table and draw from it a
little ribbon-tied parcel of letters--Jack's letters.

Her heart had failed her, womanlike, before the little sacrifice when
she had unshrinkingly accomplished the larger one. Now, however, with
determined hand, she threw the letters into the reddest cavern of her
wood-fire and with hard dry eyes watched them burn. When the last
scrap had writhed and f