o
me, than a hundred North Stars with all their bravery?"

When she spoke like this it was impossible not to believe every single
word of what she said, and Salve's expression while she had been
speaking had gradually changed to one of inexpressible happiness. So it
was really he, and he alone, who had been the hero of her life! and he
stretched out his arms to her, as though, like Alcibiades of old, he
would end the discussion by clasping her to his heart and carrying her
straight off with him to his home. But he was arrested by the deep
repelling seriousness with which she continued--

"No, Salve!--it is not which that stands between us, however ingeniously
you may have discovered it--it is not that,--it is something else. It is
that you don't trust me in your heart; that is the truth--and that has
been the real source of all these morbid ideas you have formed.

"And look you," she went on, with wild anguish in her voice, "we shall
never get on together as long as you encourage the faintest suspicion of
such thoughts; we shall never have peace beside our hearth--that peace
that I have been striving for all these years, when I have been
submitting, as I did, to everything--in a way that you know well, Salve,
was very far from natural to me," and as she said this she looked with a
magnificent air at him; "and if you cannot yet understand that--may God
help you--and us!" she ended in despair, and turning half away again to
the fire, stared dejectedly into it.

He stood before her half-averted form as if he had been paralysed, and
scarcely dared to look up at her, with such truth had all that she had
said come home to him. She had held a mirror up to their life together,
and he saw himself in it so utterly selfish and so small by the side of
all this love. He was profoundly pained and humbled, and was too
naturally truthful to wish not to acknowledge it.

He went absently to the window and stood there for a moment.

"Elizabeth," he said then, despondently, turning round, "you still must
know in your heart that you have been everything in this world to me.
But I know where my great fault to you has been, and I'll tell it you
now, fully and freely, even if you must despise me for it. Yes,
Elizabeth, it is true I have never been able to feel absolutely certain
that I had full possession of your heart--though, God be praised, you
have taught me differently to-day--since that time,"--it evidently cost
him a struggle to g