is strong, masculine hand he
had swept away all her fine-spun cobwebs of opportunity and method, and
had laid his clutch upon the very marrow of her soul. But though she had
lost the command, she was party, if not principal, to the guilt. It was
he who had taken fire from her.

"You remember last summer," said he, "that night when an arch was in the
sky? We didn't understand one another then, and I didn't understand
myself. But, during the last day or two, I've been thinking it all over.
I've had too good an opinion of myself all along."

"What is it that you've been thinking?" asked Cornelia, feeling
repelled, and yet driven, by a piteous necessity, to know all the
contents, good or bad, of this heart which was her only possession.

"Of all that had been said or done this last half-year. There's nothing
you care for more than me, is there?" he demanded, concentrating the
greatest emphasis into the question.

"If you care for me--if I can be every thing to you"--Cornelia's voice
was broken and tossed upon the uncontrolled waves of fighting emotions,
and she could give little care to the form and manner of her speech.

"I love you--of course I love you!--what else is there for me to do? But
I've been all this time trying to find out what love was. I thought I
loved Sophie, you know."

Bressant's strange words and altered manner dismayed Cornelia. What was
the matter with him? She could not get it out of her head that some
awful event must have happened, but she knew not how to frame inquiries.
Bressant continued--a determined levity in his tone was yet occasionally
broken down by a stroke of feeling terribly real:

"I was a great fool--you should have told me; you knew more about it
than I did. It was my self-conceit--I thought nothing was too good for
me. When I saw you I thought you were the flower of the world, so I
wanted you. Well--you are--the flower of the world!"

"He does love me!" said Cornelia to herself, and she knew a momentary
pang of bliss which no consideration of honor or rectitude had power to
dull or diminish.

"But, afterward," he went on, his voice lowering for an instant, "I saw
an angel--something above all the flowers of this world--and I was fool
enough to imagine she would suit me better still. You never thought so,
did you, Cornelia?" he added, with a half laugh; "well--you should have
told me!"

How he dragged her up and down, and struck her where she was most
defenseless! Did he d