culminated in a better life."

She turned abruptly from him and disappeared within her chamber,
quietly shutting the door after her, while Gerald Goddard arose to
"go" as he had been bidden.

As, with tottering gait and a pale, despairing face, he crossed the
room and parted the draperies between the two pretty parlors, he found
himself suddenly confronted by a woman so wan and haggard that, for an
instant, he failed to recognize her.

"Idiot!" hissed Anna Correlli, through her pallid, tightly-drawn lips;
"traitor! coward! viper!"

She was forced to pause simply because she was exhausted from the
venom which she had expended in the utterance of those four
expletives.

Then she sank, weak and faint, upon a chair, but with her eyes
glittering like points of flame, fastened in a look of malignant
hatred upon the astonished man.

"Anna! how came you here?--how long have you been here?" he finally
found voice to say.

"Long enough to learn of the contemptible perfidy and meanness of the
man whom, for twenty years, I have trusted," she panted, but the tone
was so hollow he never would have known who was speaking had he not
seen her.

He opened his dry lips to make some reply; but no sound came from
them.

He put out his hand to support himself by the back of her chair, for
all his strength and sense seemed on the point of failing him; while
for the moment he felt as if he could almost have been grateful to any
one who would slay him where he stood, and thus put him out of his
misery--benumb his sense of degradation and the remorse which he
experienced for his wasted life, and the wrongs of which he had been
guilty.

But, by a powerful effort, he soon mastered himself, for he was
anxious to escape from the house before the presence of his wife
should be discovered.

"Come, Anna," he said; "let us go home, where we can talk over this
matter by ourselves, without the fear of being overheard."

He attempted to assist her to rise, but she shrank away from him with
a gesture of aversion, at the same time flashing a look up at him that
almost seemed to curdle his blood, and sent a shudder of dread over
him.

"Do not dare to touch me!" she cried, hoarsely. "Go--call a carriage;
I am not able to walk. Go; I will follow you."

Without a word, he turned to obey her, and passed quickly out of the
suite without encountering any one, she following, but with a gait so
unsteady that any one watching her would have been