nated her, as the glimpse
of any evil thing fascinates, and held her spell-bound long after he
had turned back again to his silent contemplation of the fire and its
ever-drifting ashes. It was as if a vail had been rent before her eyes,
disclosing to her a living soul writhing in secret struggle with its own
worst passions; and horrified at the revelation, more than horrified at
the remembrance that it was her own action of the morning which had
occasioned this change in one she had long reverenced, if not loved, she
sank helplessly upon her knees and pressed her face to the window in a
prayer for courage to sustain this new woe and latest, if not heaviest,
disappointment.

It came while she was kneeling--came in the breath of the cold night
wind, perhaps; for, rising up, she turned her forehead gratefully to the
breeze, and drew in long draughts of it before she lifted her hand and
knocked upon the window.

The sharp, shrill sound made by her fingers on the pane reassured her as
much as it startled him. Gathering up her long cloak, which had fallen
apart in her last hurried movement, she waited with growing
self-possession for his appearance at the window.

He came almost immediately--came with his usual hasty step and with much
of his usual expression on his well-disciplined features. Flinging aside
the curtains, he cried impatiently: "Who is there?" But at sight of the
tall figure of Imogene standing upright and firm on the piazza without,
he drew back with a gesture of dismay, which was almost forbidding in
its character.

She saw it, but did not pause. Pushing up the window, she stepped into
the room; then, as he did not offer to help her, turned and shut the
window behind her and carefully arranged the curtains. He meantime stood
watching her with eyes in whose fierce light burned equal love and equal
anger.

When all was completed, she faced him. Instantly a cry broke from his
lips:

"You here!" he exclaimed, as if her presence were more than he could
meet or stand. But in another moment the forlornness of her position
seemed to strike him, and he advanced toward her, saying in a voice
husky with passion: "Wretched woman, what have you done? Was it not
enough that for weeks, months now, you have played with my love and
misery as with toys, that you should rise up at the last minute and
crush me before the whole world with a story, mad as it is false, of
yourself being a criminal and the destroyer of the w