Mary on this
day; but after a while he felt that it would be a sort of savage triumph
if he could fill the whole day with all the pain that could be packed
within its hours. He had no idea as yet what he was going to do with the
morrow, but it would certainly bring some new departure; this day he
was, for this reason, the more resolutely ready to abandon to the luxury
of woe.

Mary was alone when he visited the house; her husband had left town, for
he did not dare, with all his courage, to aggravate the popular hatred
by being visible on the day of the demonstration. She came into the room
and shook hands with him, to his surprise, without any appearance of
embarrassment. He looked at her without a word for a few moments, while
she asked a few questions in a perfectly natural tone of voice about the
meeting, his imprisonment, etc. As he looked he thought he saw a strange
and mournful change in her face. The features seemed to have grown not
merely hard, but coarse. He remembered the time when her upper lip had
appeared to his eyes short, expressive, elegant; now it seemed to have
grown long and vulgar. Her dark eyes were cold and impenetrable.

For a while they talked about indifferent things, but though he had
sworn to himself a thousand times that he would never utter a word about
her broken troth, his nerves were still too shaken and unsteady, after
his sufferings in prison and the wearing experiences through which he
had passed, to allow him to maintain complete self-control.

"And so you married Cosgrave," he said, as a beginning.

She looked at him sharply, and then answered, in the same cold and
perfectly collected voice, "Yes, I married Cosgrave."

"Are you happy?"

"Yes."

"You never cared for me?" he said with bitterness; and then the venom,
which had been choking him from the hour when he heard that his
betrothed was gone, overflowed. He went on, in a voice that grew hoarse
in its vehemence: "Look! I have been four years in prison; in the
company of burglars, pickpockets, murderers; I have been kept in silence
and solitude and restraint; and yet in all these four years I never
suffered a pang so horrible as when I heard that you had proved untrue."

"No," she answered, with a stillness that sounded strangely after the
high-pitched and passionate tones of his voice; "I was not untrue, for I
was faithful to my highest duty." Then she paused, and when next she
spoke her voice was also passionate; but i