and dismay. Did he know the bitter satire his
words conveyed? Sophie's face was hidden in her hands. She dared not
think what might come next.

"Is it nothing to you to know that you are more to me than any thing
else?" demanded he, and his tone was becoming husky and unsteady. The
passion that had been smouldering within him so long, unsuspected in its
intensity even by himself, was now beginning to be-stir itself, and
shoot forth jets of flame. "Why have you let yourself be with me--why
have you made yourself necessary to me--if I was nothing to you?"

Sophie, in the extreme depths of her degradation and abasement, became
all at once quiet and composed. She lifted her face, pale, and smitten
with suffering, from her hands, and, folding them in her lap, looked at
Bressant calmly, because she understood herself at last, and felt that
the time for hiding her head in shame had gone by.

"You have _not_ been nothing to me," said she, "though I didn't know it
before, or, rather, I _would_ not. I had an idea that I was leading you
up to higher things, as an angel might, and all the time I was making
use of God's truth and recommendation, as it were, to gratify and shield
my own selfishness and--" here her voice sank, and her lips quivered,
and grew dry, but she waited, and struggled, and finally went on--"and
immodesty. I don't know why I should tell you this--except that I've
told you every thing else, and this may save you from some of the wrong
the rest has done you. But the most of it must remain irreparable." A
long sigh quivered up from Sophie's heart, and quivered down again, like
a pebble sinking through the water. Such a sigh, in a woman, is the sign
of what can scarcely come twice in a lifetime.

"I don't understand any thing about that; I don't want to!" exclaimed
Bressant, with an impetuous gesture. "What you've done seems to have
been better than what you meant to do, at any rate. You've made yourself
every thing to me. Say that I am as much to you, and what more do we
need? Say it! say it!" and, in the vehemence of his appeal, the sick man
half raised himself from his bed.

"I cannot! I cannot!" said Sophie, in a low, penetrating voice of
suffering. "If you were the lowest of all men, I could not. I came to
you in the guise of an angel, and what I have done, what woman is there
that would not blush at it? It may not be too late to save you--"

"Stop!" cried Bressant, with an accent of hoarse, masculine co