rong man"--

"And have I no wrongs?" he broke in. "Did you think I was n't a man at
all, but just a lump of putty to be moulded by your hands? How do you
suppose I felt when we were married in New York, and you left me at the
very door of the church?"

"I did n't realise till then what I had done," she gasped, the panic of
that moment returning to her, "and I had to leave you."

"But I did realise it," he cried bitterly, "as any man would have
realised it. I realised nothing else. I walked the streets, wondering
whether it was a practical joke. You made a fool of me. You did n't
tell me beforehand that you were going to play such a trick on me."

"Trick!"

"Yes, trick! What else, in the name of God, was it? It seemed like
nothing else, at first. I could hardly remember what you said,--you
spoke so confused and were so anxious to get away,--but finally I
figured it out that you were just scared, and that I would have to wait
a little while for you to get used to the idea that you were my wife."
He paused, choked by emotion. "I waited, God knows," he went on,
"waited for nearly three years. And what did I get? A few stolen
meetings and a few kisses, not very genuine ones at that. Somehow you
carried the thing out in your father's high-handed way. I could n't
break through and get at you. Every time we met I thought I would, but
instead I took advice and promises, until it became a habit of mind. I
became tired of the mockery, and heart-sick. You made yourself seem
less and less my wife. And when I did n't see you for weeks at a time,
and when I was filled with resentment, I met Lena"--

"And did the very thing that lost me to you forever," she supplemented
relentlessly.

They had come to a point where the road ascended and ran along the
margin of a great stone quarry, from which the material that went into
the building of St. George's Hall had been hewn. The air had grown
momently colder, condensing the mist, which now floated away in milky
wreaths, disclosing the full moon shining down upon the wide sweep of
the valley toward the west. Stung to madness by her words, he stopped
and turned upon her, but his answer died on his lips, for he looked
into a face of such surpassing beauty that he seemed never to have seen
it truly before. The gathered crimson hood invested it with something
of the sorcery that Leigh had felt, that any man must have felt. The
divinity that had hitherto hedged about t