importunings to be my wife. I have been
very cruel to you."

"It is because I love you that I will not marry you," she sobbed.
"Promise me you will never doubt that. Don't ask me to explain to you why
it is; only believe me."

"I think I understand why it is already," he replied, gently. "I was very
dull not to know before. If I had known, I should not have caused you so
much grief."

She raised her head from his shoulder.

"What is it that you know?" she asked, quickly.

He thereupon proceeded to tell her, in tenderest words of reverence,
what, in his opinion, was the mystical cause, unsuspected, perhaps, even
by herself, of her unconquerable repugnance to the idea of being his
wife, truly as he knew she loved him. He blamed himself that he had not
recognized the sacred instinct which had held her back, but in his
selfish blindness had gone on urging her to do violence to her nature.
Now that his eyes were opened he would not grieve her any more. Her love
alone should satisfy and bless him. Earthly passion should no more vex
her serenity.

When he first began to speak she had regarded him with evident
astonishment. As the meaning of his words became clear to her she had
turned her face away from him and covered it with both her hands, as a
person does under an overpowering sense of shame. She did not remove them
until he had finished, when she rose abruptly.

Light enough came from the windows behind them for him to see that her
cheeks and forehead were crimson.

"I think I may as well go now," she said. "Good-bye." And in another
moment he found himself alone, not a little astonished at the suddenness
of her departure.

CHAPTER XIV.

Ida passed with a quick step through the sitting-room and upstairs to her
bedroom, where she locked the door and threw herself upon the bed in a
paroxysm of tearless sobbing.

"I believe I have no more tears left," she whispered, as at last she
raised herself and arranged her dishevelled hair.

She sat awhile in woful reverie upon the edge of the bed, and then
crossed the room to a beautiful writing-desk which Miss Ludington had
given her. She opened it, and, taking out several sheets of paper,
prepared to write. "If I had not run upstairs that moment," she murmured,
"I must have told him the whole horrible story. But it is better this
way. I believe it would have killed me to see the look on his face. Oh,
my darling, my darling! what will you think of me when y