ening the word. "But he is only so
at intervals, once a year, when the weather is very hot. Ah, what evils
have resulted from the emigration! How many fine lives ruined! He would
have been, I am sure of it, a great soldier, an honor to his country--"

"I know," I said, interrupting in my turn to let her see that it was
useless to attempt to deceive me.

She stopped, laid one hand lightly on my brow, and looked at me. "Who
has sent you here," she said, "into this home? Has God sent me help, a
true friendship to support me?" She paused, then added, as she laid her
hand firmly upon mine, "For you are good and generous--" She raised her
eyes to heaven, as if to invoke some invisible testimony to confirm her
thought, and then let them rest upon me. Electrified by the look, which
cast a soul into my soul, I was guilty, judging by social laws, of a
want of tact, though in certain natures such indelicacy really means a
brave desire to meet danger, to avert a blow, to arrest an evil before
it happens; oftener still, an abrupt call upon a heart, a blow given to
learn if it resounds in unison with ours. Many thoughts rose like gleams
within my mind and bade me wash out the stain that blotted my conscience
at this moment when I was seeking a complete understanding.

"Before we say more," I said in a voice shaken by the throbbings of
my heart, which could be heard in the deep silence that surrounded us,
"suffer me to purify one memory of the past."

"Hush!" she said quickly, touching my lips with a finger which she
instantly removed. She looked at me haughtily, with the glance of a
woman who knows herself too exalted for insult to reach her. "Be silent;
I know of what you are about to speak,--the first, the last, the only
outrage ever offered to me. Never speak to me of that ball. If as a
Christian I have forgiven you, as a woman I still suffer from your act."

"You are more pitiless than God himself," I said, forcing back the tears
that came into my eyes.

"I ought to be so, I am more feeble," she replied.

"But," I continued with the persistence of a child, "listen to me now if
only for the first, the last, the only time in your life."

"Speak, then," she said; "speak, or you will think I dare not hear you."

Feeling that this was the turning moment of our lives, I spoke to her in
the tone that commands attention; I told her that all women whom I had
ever seen were nothing to me; but when I met her, I, whose life was
stud