and prayed, weeping, recognizing his fate.

She was sorry and heart-struck. She felt cruel, selfish, ungrateful,
but for all that she could not yield nor say that she would marry him,
trying to love him. Confused images of something dearer than this as
the love of her life passed before her mind. They were images without
recognizable form or tangible substance, but they were the true love,
and this was not like them. No, she could not yield. Sorry as she
might be for him, and was, she could not promise to marry him.

"Yes," he then said after a pause, lifting up his wan face,
tear-stained and disordered, but making a sad attempt to smile--"yes,
dear Leam, I was, as you say, dreaming. We shall always be friends,
though--brother and sister, as we have been--to the end of our lives,
shall we not?"

"Yes," was her answer, tears in her own eyes and a kind of wonder at
her hardness running through her repugnance.

"Thank you, darling, thank you! If you want a friend, and I can be
that friend and can serve you, you will come to me, will you not? You
may want me some day, and you know that I shall not fail you. Don't
you know that, my royal Leam?"

"I am sure of you," she half whispered, shuddering. To be in his power
and to have rejected him! It all seemed very terrible and confused to
Leam, to whom things complex and entangled were abhorrent.

"And now forget all this. I was only dreaming, dear. Why, no, of
course you could not have married me--never could--never, never!
I know that well enough now. You see I have been ill," nervously
plucking at his hands, "and have had strange fancies, and I do not
know myself or anything about me quite yet. But forget it all. It was
only a sick fancy, and I thought what did not exist"

"I am sorry to have hurt you even in fancy," said Leam; giving a sigh
of relief. "I do not like to see you unhappy, Alick. You are so-good
to me."

"And to the end of my life I shall be what I have been," he said
earnestly. "You can trust me, Leam."

"I am sorry I have hurt you," she said again, bending forward and
looking up into his face. "But it was only a dream, was it not?"
pleadingly.

He smiled pitifully, "Yes, dear, only a dream," he answered, turning
away his head. After a while he took her hand and looked into her
face, "And now it has passed," he said, calm that she should not be
sorry.

[TO BE CONTINUED.]

LOVE'S SEPULCHRE.

Build for my love a costly sepulchre;
Not