but
"_suspect_" that "crow that flies in Heaven's sweetest air" stalks
rampant up stairs and down, and damps the ardor of everyone.

Dulce had waked early, had risen from her bed, and--with the curious
feeling full upon her of one who breaks her slumber _knowingly_ that
some grief had happened to her over night, the remembrance of which
eludes her in a tantalizing fashion--had thrown wide her window, and
gazed with troubled eyes upon the dawning world.

Then knowledge came to her, and the thought that she had made a new
contract that must influence all her life, and with this knowledge a
sinking of the heart, but no drawing back and no repentance. She dressed
herself; she knelt down and said her prayers, but peace did not come to
her, or rest or comfort of any sort, only an unholy feeling of revenge,
and an angry satisfaction that should not have found a home in her
gentle breast.

She dressed herself with great care. Her prettiest morning gown she
donned, and going into the garden plucked a last Marechal Niel rose and
placed it against her soft cheek, that was tinted as delicate as
itself.

And then came breakfast. And with a defiant air, but with some inward
shrinking she took her place behind the urn, and prepared to pour out
tea for the man who yesterday was her affianced husband, but who for the
future must be less than nothing to her.

But as fate ordains it she is not called upon to administer bohea to
Roger this morning. Mr. Dare does not put in appearance, and breakfast
is got through--without, indeed, an outbreak of any sort, but in a
dismal fashion that bespeaks breakers ahead, and suggests hidden but
terrible possibilities in the future.

Dulce is decidedly cross; a sense of depression is weighing her down, a
miserable state of melancholy that renders her unjust in her estimate of
all those around her. She tells herself she hates Roger; and then again
that she hates Stephen, too; and then the poor child's eyes fill with
tears born of a heartache and difficult of repression; to analyze them
she knows instinctively would be madness, so she blinks them bravely
back again to their native land, and having so got rid of them, gives
herself up to impotent and foolish rage, and rails inwardly against the
world and things generally.

Even to Portia she is impatient, and Julia she has annihilated twice.
The latter has been lamenting all the morning over a milliner's bill
that in length and heaviness has far