told me--if that union was
not brought about before I was twenty-two--not a dollar of the great
fortune would go to the house of Standish; and because he was clever
enough to know that money alone would not urge me, he showed me a letter
which he said my Uncle Peter had written, and which I was to read on my
seventeenth birthday, and in that letter Uncle Peter urged me to live up
to the Standish name and join in that union of the two great fortunes
which he and Grandfather Standish had always planned. I didn't dream the
letter was a forgery. And in the end they won--and I promised."

She sat with bowed head, crumpling the bit of cambric between her
fingers. "Do you despise me?" she asked.

"No," he replied in a tense, unimpassioned voice. "I love you."

She tried to look at him calmly and bravely. In his face again lay the
immobility of rock, and in his eyes a sullen, slumbering fire.

"I promised," she repeated quickly, as if regretting the impulse that
had made her ask him the question. "But it was to be business, a cold,
unsentimental business. I disliked John Graham. Yet I would marry him.
In the eyes of the law I would be his wife; in the eyes of the world I
would remain his wife--but never more than that. They agreed, and I in
my ignorance believed.

"I didn't see the trap. I didn't see the wicked triumph in John
Graham's heart. No power could have made me believe then that he wanted
to possess only _me_; that he was horrible enough to want me even
without love; that he was a great monster of a spider, and I the fly
lured into his web. And the agony of it was that in all the years since
Uncle Peter died I had dreamed strange and beautiful dreams. I lived in
a make-believe world of my own, and I read, read, read; and the thought
grew stronger and stronger in me that I had lived another life
somewhere, and that I belonged back in the years when the world was
clean, and there was love, and vast reaches of land wherein money and
power were little guessed of, and where romance and the glory of manhood
and womanhood rose above all other things. Oh, I wanted these things,
and yet because others had molded me, and because of my misguided
Standish sense of pride and honor, I was shackling myself to
John Graham.

"In the last months preceding my twenty-second birthday I learned more
of the man than I had ever known before; rumors came to me; I
investigated a little, and I began to find the hatred, and the reason
for