staken. There is pain--infinite pain--pain both sharp and
long-enduring in the grieved depths of his eyes; but there is no guilt.

"You will not answer me?" he says, in an accent of profound
disappointment, sighing again heavily. "Well, I hardly expected
it--hardly hoped it!--so be it, then, since you will have it so; and
yet--" (again taking up the note, and reading over one of its few
sentences with slow attention), "and yet there is one more question I
must put to you, after all--they both come to pretty much the same
thing. Why"--(pointing, as he speaks, to the words to which he
alludes)--"why should _you_ have taken on yourself the blame of--of his
departure from Tempest? what had _you_ to say to it?"

In his voice there is the same just severity; in his eyes there is the
same fire of deep yet governed wrath that I remember in them six months
ago, when Mrs. Huntley first threw the firebrand between us.

"I do not know," I reply, in a half whisper of impatient misery, turning
my head restlessly from side to side; "how should I know? I am _sick_ of
the subject."

"Perhaps!--so, God knows, am I; but _had_ you any thing to say to it?"

He does not often touch me now; but, as he asks this, he takes hold of
both my hands, more certainly to prevent my escaping from under his
gaze, than from any desire to caress me.

It is my last chance of confession. I little thought I should ever have
another. Late as it is, shall I avail myself of it? Nay! if not before,
why _now_? Why _now_?--when there are so much stronger reasons for
silence--when to speak would be to knock to atoms the newly-built
edifice of Barbara's happiness--to rake up the old and nearly dead ashes
of Frank's frustrated, and for aught I know, sincerely repented sin? So
I answer, faintly indeed, yet quite audibly and distinctly:

"Nothing."

"NOTHING?" (in an accent and with eyes of the keenest, wistfulest
interrogation, as if he would wring from me, against my will, the
confession I so resolutely withhold).

But I turn away from that heart-breaking, heart-broken scrutiny, and
answer:

"Nothing!"

CHAPTER XLI.

"She dwells with beauty--beauty that must die,
And joy whose hand is ever at his lips
Bidding adieu!"

Thus I accomplished my second lie: I that, at home, used to be a proverb
for blunt truth-telling. They say that "_facilis descensus Averni_." I
do not agree with them. I have not found it easy. To me it has seemed a