ry me tomorrow. There! Will
you?"

"Oh, Chris! Tomorrow?"

"Yes, tomorrow! I'm not a psychologist or a doctor, but I believe I can
cure you myself. Will you promise, Pen?"

Her eyes brimmed with tears of gratitude and fondness.

"You want me--anyway?"

"Anyway."

"Then I say--yes! I will! I will! Oh my love!" She drew him slowly down
to her and kissed his eyes gently, her face radiant with sweetness and
purity. A moment later the chimes rang out twelve.

As the minutes passed Christopher watched her in breathless but
confident expectation. The crisis had come and she was passing it--she
had passed it safely. They talked on fondly--five minutes, ten minutes,
fifteen minutes, and still there were no untoward developments, no sign
of anything evil or irrational. Penelope was her own adorable self. The
spell was broken. Nothing had happened.

"You see, it's all right?" he laughed. "You needn't be afraid any more."

"Wait!" she looked at the clock. "Ten minutes yet!"

He longed to tell her that they had already passed the fatal moment,
passed it by twenty minutes, but he restrained his ardor.

"Chris, my love, if we are really to be married tomorrow--how wonderful
that seems!--I must have no secrets from you. What my mother said is
true--a woman must cleanse her soul. I want to tell you something--for
my sake, not for yours--then we will never refer to it again."

"But, Penelope--"

"For my sake, Chris."

"It isn't about that steamboat?"

"It is, darling. I must tell it. Fix the pillows behind me. There! Sit
close to me--that's right. Now listen! This dream is a repetition of
what happened on the boat. It would have been much better if I had told
you all about it long ago."

"Why?"

She hesitated.

"Because--it is not so much the memory of what I did that worries me, as
the fear that--you will be ashamed of me or--or hate me--when you know."

Herrick saw that her cheeks were flushed, but at least her mind was
occupied, he reflected, and the minutes were passing.

"I could never be ashamed of you, Penelope."

"If I were only sure of that," she sighed, then with a great effort, and
speaking low, sometimes scarcely lifting her eyes, she told her lover
the story of the Fall River steamboat.

The main point was that her husband, a coarse sensualist, whom she
despised, had, during the year preceding his death, accepted a _chambre
apart_ arrangement, that being the only condition on which Penelope
woul