TER X.

AT THE FOOT OF THE STAIRS.

"'You think I am playing with you,' she murmured. 'I am not. I have
sickened of these nuptials and am going back. If you want to, you may
kill me where I sit. You carry a dagger, I know; one more red blossom
will not show on my breast. Give it to me if you will, but turn the
horses.'

"She meant it, however much my lost heart might cry out for its
happiness and honor. Leaning forward, I told the pompous driver that
Miss Leighton had been taken very ill, and bade him drive back; and then
with the calmness born of utter despair and loss, I said to her:

"'In pity for my pride drop your head upon my shoulder. I have said you
were sick, and sick you must be. It is the least you can do for me now.'

"She obeyed me. That head on which in fancy I had set the crowns of
empires, for whose every hair my heart had given a throb, sank coldly
down till it rested upon the heart she had broken; and while I steadied
my nerves to meet the changed faces of the crowd, the carriage gave a
sudden turn, and amid murmurings that fell almost unheeded on my
benumbed senses, we wheeled about and faced again the gates through
which we had so lately issued.

"'She is ill,' I shouted to Miss Dudleigh, as we passed her carriage.
But she gave me no reply. She was gazing over the heads of the crowd at
some distant object that enthralled her every look and sense; and moved
by her expression as I thought never to be moved by anything again, I
followed her glance, and there, on the outskirts of the crowd, crouching
amid branches that yet refused to hide him, I saw Edwin Urquhart; and
the miserable truth smote home to my heart that it was he who had
stopped my marriage--he, whom I had thought far distant, but who had now
come to hinder, by some secret gesture or glance, my bride on her path
to the altar.

"A dagger was hidden in my breast, and I still wonder that I did not
leap from the carriage, burst through the crowd, and slay him where he
crouched in cowardly ambush. But I let the moment go by, perhaps because
I dreaded to bring the shadow of another woe into Miss Dudleigh's white
face, and almost immediately the throng had surged in thickly between
us, and Miss Dudleigh's carriage had turned after ours, and there was
nothing further to do but to ride back, with the false face pressed in
seeming insensibility to my breast, and that false heart beating out its
cold throbs of triumph upon mine.

"I bore it