arms, and she shrank from him almost as if she faded
away.

"Why did you deceive me?" he groaned. "You should not have let me love
you, knowing the truth."

"I did not know that you loved me, or that I loved you, till that
night," she pleaded piteously. "If I had known I would have prevented
it. I have told you as soon as I remembered."

"You have broken my heart," he cried, flinging himself on the sofa, his
face buried in the cushions. And then, strong man as he was, a brave
soldier and an English country gentleman, he burst into a passion of
tears that shook him as the storm had shaken the earth last
night--tears that were the culmination of his agony, not its relief.

Leam stood by him as pale as the shattered lilies in the garden. What
could she do? How could she comfort him? Tainted and dishonored, she
dared not even lay her hand on his--her infamous and murderous hand, and
he so pure and noble! Neither could she pray for him, nor yet for
herself. Pray? to whom? To God? God had turned His face away from her,
even as her lover had now turned away his: He was angry with her, and
still unappeased. She dared not pray to Him, and He would not hear her
if she did. The saints were no longer the familiar and parental deities,
grave and helpful, to whom she could refer all her sorrows and
perplexities, as in earlier times, sure of speedy succor. The teaching
of the later days had destroyed the simple fetichism of childhood; and
now--afraid of God, by whom she was unforgiven; the saints swept out of
her spiritual life like those mist-wreaths of morning which were once
taken for solid towers and impregnable fortresses; the Holy Mother
vanished with the rest; all spiritual help a myth, all spiritual
consolation gone--how could she pray? Lonely as her life had been since
mamma died, it had never been so lonely as now, when she felt that God
had abandoned her, and that she had sacrificed her lover to her sense of
truth and honor and what was due to his nobility.

She stood by him and watched his passionate outburst with anguish
infinitely more intense than his own. To have caused him this sorrow was
worse than to have endured it for herself. There was no sacrifice of
self that she could not have made for his good. Spaniard as she was, she
would have been above jealousy if another woman would have made him
happier than she; and if her death would have given him gain or joy, she
would have died for him as another would have