o a thousand replicas, and eddy
round me. I walked out of the room.

"It will never be," I thought over and over to myself as I went down
the stairs.

I turned into the dining-room, and flung myself into an armchair and
waited there. Everything but Lucia herself was forgotten. My
consciousness seemed suspended almost as completely as hers. At last
the door opened, and Mrs. Grant herself came in. She started on seeing
me.

"You still here, Victor," she said coldly.

"How could I go?" I murmured. "Is she better?"

"Yes; she is better."

Mrs. Grant's face was white and composed, her tones like ice. I saw she
was unwilling to trust herself to speak to me even.

"May I not speak to her for one minute?"

"Certainly not. Are you not satisfied with the mischief you have done
already?" Her voice shook with suppressed indignation. "She tells me
she has fixed the thirteenth for your marriage. So that is the subject
you came to press to-day! I think your conduct is most disgraceful."

My attitude of mind was--I don't care two d---s what you think.
However, I merely said,--

"I think you do me an injustice. I did not mean to distress Lucia
to-day; but what is the use of this sort of thing going on as it has
been doing? I have offered to release her from the engagement if she
wishes, and in that case, I should go away altogether. I don't see that
to keep up our present relations is any benefit to either of us."

Mrs. Grant's eyebrows relaxed a little.

"Perhaps you are right, Victor," she said, with a sigh. "Only we must
be careful, or we shall lose her altogether."

Her voice shook now with something that was not anger. I held out my
hand.

"I will come in the evening," I said, gently, "to hear of her if I
cannot see her. May I?"

Mrs. Grant smiled, we shook hands, and I went out. I walked absently up
the pavement, and then stood looking out as absently for a hansom. Now
I had pushed matters to the point, I had not delayed nor put off action
in this case, and I had attained the object with which I had come, but
somehow I did not feel so satisfied as I had anticipated I should when
I came away victorious.

Things were so different now from what they had been a year ago, and as
I stood there looking up and down for a crawler, above the noise of the
London thoroughfare, her own words to me in Paris rang with terrible
distinctness, that prophecy wrung from her in the agony of her woman's
longing--"I shall never be