er and very different thought overtook
him.

Putting the letters into his pocket, he followed Mildred into the
boudoir. She was sitting, looking very faint, upon a chair, her arms
hanging down helplessly by her side.

"Mildred," he said, hoarsely.

She looked up with a faint air of surprise.

"What, are you not gone?"

"Mildred, beyond what you have just said I know nothing of the
contents of these letters; but whatever they may be, here and now,
before I read them, I again offer to marry you. I owe it to you and to
my own sense of what is right that I should marry you."

He spoke calmly, and with evident sincerity.

"Do you know that I read your letter just now, and had half a mind to
burn it; that I am little better than a thief?"

"I guessed that you had read it."

"And do you understand that your Angela is unmarried, that she was
never really married at all--and that she asks nothing better than to
marry you?"

"I understand."

"And you still offer to make me your wife?"

"I do. What do you say?"

A flood of light filled Mildred's eyes as she rose and confronted him.

"I say, Arthur, that you are a very noble gentleman, and, that though
from this day I must be a miserable woman, I shall always be proud to
have loved you. Listen, my dear. When I read that letter, I felt that
your Angela towered over me like the Alps, her snowy purity stained
only by the reflected lights of heaven. I felt that I could not
compete with such a woman as this, that I could never hope to hold you
from one so calmly faithful, so dreadfully serene, and I knew that she
had conquered, robbing me for Time, and, as I fear, leaving me
beggared for Eternity. In the magnificence of her undying power, in
the calm certainty of her command, she flings me your life as though
it were nothing. 'Take it,' she says; 'he will never love you--he is
mine; but I can afford to wait. I shall claim him before the throne of
God.' But now, look you, Arthur, if you can behave like the generous-
hearted gentleman you are, I will show you that I am not behind you in
generosity. I will _not_ marry you. I have done with you; or, to be
more correct," and she gave a hard little laugh, "you have done with
me. Go back to Angela, the beautiful woman with inscrutable grey eyes,
who waits for you, clothed in her eternal calm, like a mountain in its
snows. I shall send her that tiara as a wedding-present; it will
become her well. Go back, Arthur; but sometime