ess that it
seemed strange to see you here, treading the narrow path of English
conventionalism, after--after--"

"I know," she said. "But life is full of the unexpected. You do not
ask how these five years have been spent. The years that have changed
the dreamy enthusiastic girl into a woman such as you see before you."

"I do not ask," he said, his voice vibrating beneath an emotion he could
not conceal, "because it can be no pleasure to me to learn. Do you
forget what I told you? Do you think that the memory of these five
years is a pleasant one for me? Against my prayers, against my
warnings, you chose your own life. Are you free--now?"

"No," she said, in a strange stifled voice, "never _that_--never while I
wear the shackles of humanity!" She sank suddenly down in a low seat,
and buried her face in her hands. "Oh," she cried, faintly, "if I could
tell you--if I only dared; but I cannot! My bondage is deeper--my
chains are heavier. Sometimes I think those years were only a dream--a
horrible, frightful dream--but then, again, I _know_ they were not."

"What do you mean?" he asked, his voice sharp with terror, for this
shame and remorse that convulsed her, and made her one with the common
weakness of her common womanhood, was something altogether different to
the supremacy she had always shown in her proud girlhood.

"I cannot tell you," she said, "I dare not."

"Do you forget," he said, severely, "that if I _wish_ to know, I shall
learn it?"

"Not now," she said, suddenly, and raised her face and looked calmly,
yet not defiantly, back at him with her great, sad, and most lovely
eyes. "I have passed beyond your power," she went on. "Beyond most
human influence, I might say--" then she shuddered and her eyes sank
again. "But oh!" she cried, "at what a cost!--at what a cost!"

He felt as if his heart grew suddenly chill and stony. "I believe you
are right," he said; "my power is gone--yours is the strongest now."

He was silent for a few moments. "One question only," he then said; "I
don't wish to pry into your past. It is enough that we have met--for
that would never have taken place if you had not needed me. So much I
know. Your marriage--was it as I foretold?"

"It was worse," she said, bitterly--"a million times worse! Body and
soul, how I have suffered! And yet, as I told you then, _it had to
be_."

"I did not believe it then," he said stormily; "I refuse to believe it
now. Your