friend!"

"Why, didn't you forbid him to go to you?"

"Ah," she nodded, "the confidence, it was intimate indeed. But since
you have got it, won't you agree that any man, if he loved a woman,
would disobey her?"

"Westboro' would not."

The Duchess said coldly: "Pride is not love."

"You didn't mean him, then, to keep his vow?"

"Yes," she slowly thought out, "I did indeed, with all my heart."

"And now?"

She turned towards the house again, and as she walked back, said: "I
don't quite know."

And Bulstrode asked her: "That is why you are here, to find out?"

"Partly."

Her companion's face grew stern. The Duchess did not see it for her
eyes had again swept the upper window. At her side Bulstrode went on:
"You have taken ten years to discover that you did not love your
husband. You have taken one year to begin to wonder, to doubt, to
suspect, to half think that you do; it's an unstable state of heart,
Duchess, terribly unstable."

The woman stopped short at his side, and now as she lifted up her eyes
and saw him, was a little startled if not frightened at his expression.

"Unstable," she repeated, with a world of scorn in her voice. "How can
you use that word to me, knowing the facts of the case?"

"Oh, a man," said Bulstrode rather impatiently, "is a worthless,
wretched piece of mechanism altogether. I grant you that--utterly
unworthy the love and confidence of any good woman. He is capable of
all the vagaries and infidelities possible. We'll judge him so. But,"
he continued, "these wandering, vagrant derelicts have been known to
tie fast, to find port, to drop anchor. They have even brought great
riches and important treasure into harbor, fetched a world of good luck
home. There's only one thing in the universe that can keep a man,
Duchess, only one."

"Well?" she encouraged him.

"A woman's heart," he said deeply, "a woman's true tenderness; and it
needs all that heart, all its love, all its patience and sacrifice to
keep that man--all and forever."

He saw her bosom heave; she had thrown her fur off, as if its warmth
stifled her. Vivid color had come into her face. Her pallor for the
time was destroyed, and as she flashed a rebellious look at him, a look
of revolt and selfhood, he seemed to see again the American
girl--wilful, egotistical, spoiled--an imperious creature whose
caprices had been opposed to the Duke's Anglo-Saxon temperament and
national egoism.

At this moment, th