a single caress.

"I cannot make you happy, Elinor. Algernon alone can do that."

"Algernon! Why Algernon?" said Elinor, bursting into tears. "Is it to
make me more miserable that you constantly remind me of my loss?"

"How do you know that he is dead?"

"I have your word for it; the evidence of your friend's letter; his long
silence. What frightful images you conjure up! You seem determined to
make me wretched to-night."

She sprang from her lowly seat, and left the room in an agony of tears.
Mark looked after her for a moment:--"Aye, he still keeps your heart.
But I have had my revenge."

The agony which he had endured in the garden on that memorable night,
when he first discovered that Elinor loved his brother, was light in
comparison to the pangs which shook the inmost soul of his unhappy wife,
when time at last revealed the full extent of her misery, and of her
husband's deep-laid treachery--and Algernon returned from India with an
independent fortune to claim his bride, and found her the wife of his
brother.

The monster who had supplanted him in his father's affections had now
robbed him of his wife. Algernon did not seek an explanation from Mrs.
Hurdlestone, either personally or by letter. He supposed that her
present position was one of her own choosing, and he was too proud to
utter a complaint. The hey-day of youth was past, and he had seen too
much of the world to be surprised at the inconstancy of a poor girl, who
had been offered, during her lover's absence, a splendid alliance. He
considered that Elinor was sufficiently punished for her broken vows in
being forced to spend her life in the society of such a sordid wretch as
Mark Hurdlestone.

"God forgive her," he said; "she has nearly broken my heart, but I pity
her from my very soul."

When the dreadful truth flashed upon the mind of Mrs. Hurdlestone, she
bitterly accused her husband of the deception he had practised. Mr.
Hurdlestone, instead of denying or palliating the charge, even boasted
of his guilt, and entered into a minute detail of each revolting
circumstance--the diabolical means that he had employed to destroy her
peace.

This fiend, to whom in an evil hour she had united her destiny, had
carefully intercepted the correspondence between herself and Algernon,
and employed a friend in India to forge the plausible account he had
received of her lover's death--and finally, as the finishing stroke to
all this deep-laid villany, he had