can think of or mourn over now is that, by
destroying myself, I have not succeeded in saving Craik Mansell."

If her purpose was to probe the lawyer's soul for the deadly wound that
had turned all his sympathies to gall, she was successful at last.
Turning upon her with a look in which despair and anger were strangely
mingled, he cried:

"And me, Imogene--have you no thought for me?"

"Sir," said she, "any thought from one disgraced as I am now, would be
an insult to one of your character and position."

It was true. In the eyes of the world Tremont Orcutt and Imogene Dare
henceforth stood as far apart as the poles. Realizing it only too well,
he uttered a half-inarticulate exclamation, and trod restlessly to the
other end of the room. When he came back, it was with more of the
lawyer's aspect and less of the baffled lover's.

"Imogene," he said, "what could have induced you to resort to an
expedient so dreadful? Had you lost confidence in me? Had I not told you
I would save this man from his threatened fate?"

"You cannot do every thing," she replied. "There are limits even to a
power like yours. I knew that Craik was lost if I gave to the court the
testimony which Mr. Ferris expected from me."

"Ah, then," he cried, seizing with his usual quickness at the admission
which had thus unconsciously, perhaps, slipped from her, "you
acknowledge you uttered a perjury to save yourself from making
declarations you believed to be hurtful to the prisoner?"

A faint smile crossed her lips, and her whole aspect suddenly changed.

"Yes," she said; "I have no motive for hiding it from you now. I
perjured myself to escape destroying Craik Mansell. I was scarcely the
mistress of my own actions. I had suffered so much I was ready to do any
thing to save the man I had so relentlessly pushed to his doom. I forgot
that God does not prosper a lie."

The jealous gleam which answered her from the lawyer's eyes was a
revelation.

"You regret, then," he said, "that you tossed my happiness away with a
breath of your perjured lips?"

"I regret I did not tell the truth and trust God."

At this answer, uttered with the simplicity of a penitent spirit, Mr.
Orcutt unconsciously drew back.

"And, may I ask, what has caused this sudden regret?" he inquired, in a
tone not far removed from mockery; "the generous action of the prisoner
in relieving you from your self-imposed burden of guilt by an
acknowledgment that struck at the foundati