ar more.

She suddenly became silent; the most painful embarrassment showed itself
in her face and manner. "Never mind the rest," she said, mastering her
confusion after an interval. "I have had some hard trials to bear; I
forget things--" she made an effort to finish the sentence, and gave it
up, and called to the dog to come to her. The tears were in her eyes,
and that was the way she took to hide them from me.

In general, I am not quick at reading the minds of others--but I thought
I understood Stella. Now that we were face to face, the impulse to trust
me had, for the moment, got the better of her caution and her pride;
she was half ashamed of it, half inclined to follow it. I hesitated no
longer. The time for which I had waited--the time to prove, without any
indelicacy on my side, that I had never been unworthy of her--had surely
come at last.

"Do you remember my reply to your letter about Father Benwell?" I asked.

"Yes--every word of it."

"I promised, if you ever had need of me, to prove that I had never been
unworthy of your confidence. In your present situation, I can honorably
keep my promise. Shall I wait till you are calmer? or shall I go on at
once?"

"At once!"

"When your mother and your friends took you from me," I resumed, "if you
had shown any hesitation--"

She shuddered. The image of my unhappy wife, vindictively confronting us
on the church steps, seemed to be recalled to her memory. "Don't go back
to it!" she cried. "Spare me, I entreat you."

I opened the writing-case in which I keep the papers sent to me by
the Rector of Belhaven, and placed them on the table by which she was
sitting. The more plainly and briefly I spoke now, the better I thought
it might be for both of us.

"Since we parted at Brussels," I said, "my wife has died. Here is a copy
of the medical certificate of her death."

Stella refused to look at it. "I don't understand such things," she
answered faintly. "What is this?"

She took up my wife's death-bed confession.

"Read it," I said.

She looked frightened. "What will it tell me?" she asked.

"It will tell you, Stella, that false appearances once led you into
wronging an innocent man."

Having said this, I walked away to a window behind her, at the further
end of the room, so that she might not see me while she read.

After a time--how much longer it seemed to be than it really was!--I
heard her move. As I turned from the window, she ran to me, and fel