ould guess what she was going to
do she had sunk on her knees beside him.

"I am going to tell you," she said, "a hundred things I never told you
before. You are to hear me confess; you are to give me penance; you are
to say the hardest things possible to me. If you don't I shall distrust
you."

She smiled at him again through her tears. "Marcella," he cried in
distress, trying to lift her, to rise himself, "you can't imagine that I
should let _you_ kneel to _me_!"

"You must," she said steadily; "well, if it will make you happier, I
will take a stool and sit by you. But you are there above me--I am at
your feet--it is the same chair, and you shall not move"--she stooped in
a hasty passion, as though atoning for her "shall," and kissed his
hand--"till I have said it all--every word!"

So she began it--her long confession, from the earliest days. He winced
often--she never wavered. She carried through the sharpest analysis of
her whole mind with regard to him; of her relations to him and Wharton
in the old days; of the disloyalty and lightness with which she had
treated the bond, that yet she had never, till quite the end, thought
seriously of breaking; of her selfish indifference to, even contempt
for, his life, his interests, his ideals; of her calm forecasts of a
married state in which she was always to take the lead and always to be
in the right--then of the real misery and struggle of the Hurd trial.

"That was my first true _experience_," she said; "it made me wild and
hard, but it burnt, it purified. I began to live. Then came the day
when--when we parted--the time in hospital--the nursing--the evening on
the terrace. I had been thinking of you--because remorse made me think
of you--solitude--Mr. Hallin--everything. I wanted you to be kind to me,
to behave as though you had forgotten everything, because it would have
made me comfortable and happy; or I thought it would. And then, that
night you wouldn't be kind, you wouldn't forget--instead, you made me
pay my penalty."

She stared at him an instant, her dark brows drawn together, struggling
to keep her tears back, yet lightening from moment to moment into a
divine look of happiness. He tried to take possession of her, to stop
her, to silence all this self-condemnation on his breast. But she would
not have it; she held him away from her.

"That night, though I walked up and down the terrace with Mr. Wharton
afterwards, and tried to fancy myself in love wit