k! Suppose I loved you yet! Suppose I hated my fate!
What can I do? I am broken by the war. I have lost everything almost.
I had as lief be dead and done with it."

The Colonel spoke with a low remembered voice that thrilled through
Laura. He was looking into her eyes as he had looked in those old days,
when no birds of all those that sang in the groves where they walked sang
a note of warning. He was wounded. He had been punished. Her strength
forsook her with her rage, and she sank upon a chair, sobbing,

"Oh! my God, I thought I hated him!"

The Colonel knelt beside her. He took her hand and she let him keep it.
She, looked down into his face, with a pitiable tenderness, and said in a
weak voice.

"And you do love me a little?"

The Colonel vowed and protested. He kissed her hand and her lips. He
swore his false soul into perdition.

She wanted love, this woman. Was not her love for George Selby deeper
than any other woman's could be? Had she not a right to him? Did he
not belong to her by virtue of her overmastering passion? His wife--she
was not his wife, except by the law. She could not be. Even with the
law she could have no right to stand between two souls that were one.
It was an infamous condition in society that George should be tied to
her.

Laura thought this, believed it; because she desired to believe it. She
came to it as an original propositions founded an the requirements of her
own nature. She may have heard, doubtless she had, similar theories that
were prevalent at that day, theories of the tyranny of marriage and of
the freedom of marriage. She had even heard women lecturers say, that
marriage should only continue so long as it pleased either party to it
--for a year, or a month, or a day. She had not given much heed to this,
but she saw its justice now in a dash of revealing desire. It must be
right. God would not have permitted her to love George Selby as she did,
and him to love her, if it was right for society to raise up a barrier
between them. He belonged to her. Had he not confessed it himself?

Not even the religious atmosphere of Senator Dilworthy's house had been
sufficient to instill into Laura that deep Christian principle which had
been somehow omitted in her training. Indeed in that very house had she
not heard women, prominent before the country and besieging Congress,
utter sentiments that fully justified the course she was marking out for
hersel