ilely deceived and deserted her. I bowed and
left them, feeling with no common bitterness the humiliation of entering
into rivalry with Mr. Van Brandt.

I crossed to the other side of the street. Before I had taken three
steps away from her, the old infatuation fastened its hold on me again.
I submitted, without a struggle against myself, to the degradation
of turning spy and following them home. Keeping well behind, on the
opposite side of the way, I tracked them to their own door, and entered
in my pocket-book the name of the street and the number of the house.

The hardest critic who reads these lines cannot feel more contemptuously
toward me than I felt toward myself. Could I still love a woman after
she had deliberately preferred to me a scoundrel who had married her
while he was the husband of another wife? Yes! Knowing what I now knew,
I felt that I loved her just as dearly as ever. It was incredible, it
was shocking; but it was true. For the first time in my life, I tried to
take refuge from my sense of my own degradation in drink. I went to my
club, and joined a convivial party at a supper table, and poured glass
after glass of champagne down my throat, without feeling the slightest
sense of exhilaration, without losing for an instant the consciousness
of my own contemptible conduct. I went to my bed in despair; and through
the wakeful night I weakly cursed the fatal evening at the river-side
when I had met her for the first time. But revile her as I might,
despise myself as I might, I loved her--I loved her still!

Among the letters laid on my table the next morning there were two which
must find their place in this narrative.

The first letter was in a handwriting which I had seen once before, at
the hotel in Edinburgh. The writer was Mrs. Van Brandt.

"For your own sake" (the letter ran) "make no attempt to see me, and
take no notice of an invitation which I fear you will receive with this
note. I am living a degraded life. I have sunk beneath your notice. You
owe it to yourself, sir, to forget the miserable woman who now writes to
you for the last time, and bids you gratefully a last farewell."

Those sad lines were signed in initials only. It is needless to say
that they merely strengthened my resolution to see her at all hazards. I
kissed the paper on which her hand had rested, and then I turned to the
second letter. It contained the "invitation" to which my correspondent
had alluded, and it was expr