business will let me. Some day I will come back, never to go away. Oh,
will not that be delightful?"

Her extreme distress, her terror lest she might not return, her
forebodings lest he should some day cease to love her, impressed him for a
moment--only for a truant moment--with doubts as to a mystery. As he left
the railway station, full of gratitude for the last glance of her loving
eyes, he asked himself once or twice, "What is it?"

What was it?

We will follow her. She is ominously sad during the lonely journey: she is
almost stern by the time she arrives in New York. In place of the summer's
sweetness and gayety, there is a wintry and almost icy expression in her
face, as if she were about to encounter trials to which she had been long
accustomed, and which she had learned to bear with hardness if not with
resentment.

No one meets her at the railway station, no one at the door of the sombre
house where her carriage stops--no one until she has passed up stairs into
a darkling parlor.

There she is received by the man whom she has so often described to
Deighton--a man of thin, erect form, a high and narrow forehead, regular
and imperturbable features, fixed and filmy black eyes, a mechanical
carriage, an icy demeanor.

At sight of her he slightly bowed--then he advanced slowly to her and took
her hand: he seemed to be hesitating whether he should give her any
further welcome.

"You need not kiss me," she said, her eyes fixed on the floor. "You do not
wish to do it."

He sighed, as if he too were unhappy, or at least weary; but he drew his
hand away and resumed his walk up and down the room.

"So you chose to pass your summer in a village?" he presently said, in the
tone of a man who has ceased to rule, but not ceased to criticise. "I hope
you liked it."

"I told you in my letters that I liked it," she replied in an
expressionless monotone.

"And I told you in my letters that I did not like it. It would have been
more decent in you to stay in Portland, among the people whom I had
requested to take care of you. However, you are accustomed to have your
own way. I can only observe that when a woman will have her own way, she
ought to pay her own way."

A flush, perhaps of shame, perhaps of irritation, crossed her hitherto
pale face, but she made no response to the scoff, and continued to look at
the floor.

After a few seconds, during which neither of them broke the silence, she
seemed to understand t