e moved away from the Mother's grave,
saying to him with a slight beckoning gesture of the hand, "Please
come!..."

Saxham followed her, hearing the harsh, jeering laughter of that other
Saxham above the faint rustle of her dress. His covetous, despairing eyes
dwelt on her and clung about her. Ah! the exquisite poise of the little
head, with its red-brown waves and coils; the upright, slender elegance of
shape, like a young palm-tree; the long, smooth, undulating step with
which she moved between the graves, picking her way with sedulous,
delicate care among the little crowding white-painted crosses; the
atmosphere of girlish charm and womanly allurement that breathed from her
and environed her!...

His torpid pulses throbbed again. The voice began again its whispering at
his ear.

"You cannot live without her. Accept her conditions. Better to be unhappy
in the sight and sound and touch of her, unpossessed, than to be
desperate, lacking her. Accept her conditions with a mental reservation.
Trust to Time, the healer, to bring change and forgetfulness. Or, break
your promise to that dead man, and tell her--as he would have had you tell
her, remember!--as he would have had you tell her!--that when he asked her
hand in marriage, he was the wedded husband of the dancer, Lessie
Lavigne!"

He knew where she was leading him--to Beauvayse's grave. The voice kept
whispering, urging as they went. He saw and heard as a man sees and hears
in a dream the pair of butterflies that hovered yet about the fresh
flowers her hands had gathered and placed there. One jewel-winged,
diamond-eyed insect rose languidly and wavered away as Lynette's light
footsteps drew near. The other remained, poised upon the lip of a honeyed,
waxen blossom, with closed, vertically-held wings and quivering antennae,
sucking its sweet juices as greedily as the dead man had drunk of the joy
of life.

Now she was speaking:

"Dr. Saxham, I have brought you here because I have something to tell you
that _he_"--her face quivered--"should have been told. When you spoke a
little while ago of openness and candour--when you said that you would
never mislead or deceive me for your own advantage, that I should know the
worst of you together with the best--you held up before me, quite
unknowingly, an example that showed me--that proved to me"--her voice
wavered and broke--"how much I am your inferior in honesty and truth!"

"_You_ my inferior!" Saxham almost laughed