tuous emotion
flamed in his heart.

"Don't lie to me," she said passionately, "there's nothing I hate so
much as a lie."

"I never lied to you in my life," he answered, as he drew back with an
expression of cold reproach--for it seemed to him that her attack had
offered an unpardonable affront to his honour.

"When you did not come I sent a note to you--I feared something had
happened--I hardly knew what--but something. The note came back. They
told the messenger--" the words were wrenched out of her as by some act
of bodily torture, and, at last, in spite of her struggle, she could go
no further. Pausing she looked at him in silence, while her hand pressed
into her bosom as if to keep down by physical force the passion which
she could no longer control by a mental effort. The violence of temper
which in a coarser--a more flesh-and-blood beauty--would have been
repelling and almost vulgar, was in her chastened and ennobled by the
ethereal quality in her outward form--and the emotion she expressed
seemed to belong less to the ordinary human impulses than to some finer
rage of spirit which was independent of the gesture or the utterance of
flesh.

"And you suspected what?" he demanded, in a hurt and angry voice, "you
were told some story by a servant--and without waiting for my
explanation--without giving me a decent chance to clear myself--you were
ready, on the instant, to believe me capable--of what?"

Her suspicion worked him into a furious resentment; and the
consciousness that he, himself, was at fault was swallowed up by the
greater wrong of her unuttered accusation. While he spoke he was
honestly of the opinion that their whole future happiness was wrecked by
the fact that she believed him capable of the thing which he had done.

"I would die now before I would justify myself to you," he added.

Before the unaffected resentment in his face, she was suddenly, and
without knowing it, thrown into a position of defence.

"What could I believe? What else was there for me to believe?" she asked
in a muffled voice. Then, as she looked up at him, it seemed to her that
for the first time she saw the man as he really was in the truth of his
own nature--saw his egoism, his vanity, his shallowness and saw, too,
with the same mental clearness, that he had ceased to love her. But at
the instant with this vision before her, she told herself that the
discovery made no difference--that it no longer mattered whether he
lo