r? don't you love me? don't you mean to take me home with you?"

"Would you go home with me, Hetty?" he asked emphatically; "go back
to Welbury? let every man, woman, and child in the county, nay, in the
State, know that all my grief for you had been worse than needless,
that I had been a deserted husband for ten years, and that you had been
living under an assumed name all that time? Would you do this?"

Hetty's face paled. "What else is there to do?" she said.

He continued:

"Could you bear to have your name, your father's name, my name,
all dragged into notoriety, all tarnished by being linked with this
monstrous tale of a woman who fled--for no reason whatever--from her
home, friends, husband, and hid herself, and was found only by an
accident?"

"Oh, Eben! spare me," moaned Hetty.

"I can't spare you now, Hetty," he answered. "You must look the thing in
the face. I have been looking it in the face ever since the first hour
in which I found you. What are we to do?"

"I will stay on here if you think it best," said Hetty. "If you will be
happier so. Nobody need ever know that I am alive."

Doctor Eben threw his arms around her. "Leave you here! Why, Hetty, will
you never understand that I love you?" he exclaimed; "love you, love
you, would no more leave you than I would kill myself?"

"But what is there, then, that we can do?" asked Hetty.

"Be married again here, as if we had never been married! You under your
new name," replied Doctor Eben rapidly.

Hetty's face expressed absolute horror. "We--you and I--married again!
Why Eben, it would be a mockery," she exclaimed.

"Not so much a mockery," her husband retorted, "as every thing that I
have done, and every thing that you have done for ten whole years."

"Oh, Eben! I don't think it would be right," cried Hetty. "It would be a
lie."

"A lie!" ejaculated her husband, scornfully. Poor Hetty! The bitter
harvest of her wrong deed was garnered for her, poured upon her head
at every turn, by the pitilessness of events. Inexorable seasons, surer
than any other seedtime and harvest, are those uncalendared seasons in
which souls sow and reap with meek patience.

Hetty replied:

"I know I have lived, acted, told a lie, Eben. Don't taunt me with it.
How can you, if you really believe all I have told you of the reasons
which led me to it?"

"My Hetty," said Dr. Eben, "I don't taunt you with it. I do believe all
you have told me. I do know that you did it f