he
experiment. Well, and what did they do at the Home? Did they send after
you, to fetch you back?"

"They wouldn't take me back--they sent my clothes here after me."

"Ah, those were the rules, I reckon. I begin to see my way to the end of
it now. Amelius gave you house-room?"

She looked at him proudly. "He gave me a room of my own," she said.

His next question was the exact repetition of the question which he
had put to Regina in Paris. The only variety was in the answer that he
received.

"Are you fond of Amelius?"

"I would die for him!"

Rufus had hitherto spoken, standing. He now took a chair.

"If Amelius had not been brought up at Tadmor," he said, "I should take
my hat, and wish you good morning. As things are, a word more may be a
word in season. Your lessons here seem to have agreed with you, Miss.
You're a different sort of girl to what you were when I last saw you."

She surprised him by receiving that remark in silence. The colour left
her face. She sighed bitterly. The sigh puzzled Rufus: he held his
opinion of her in suspense, until he had heard more.

"You said just now you would die for Amelius," he went on, eyeing her
attentively. "I take that to be a woman's hysterical way of mentioning
that she feels interest in Amelius. Are you fond enough of him to leave
him, if you could only be persuaded that leaving him was for his good?"

She abruptly left the table, and went to the window. When her back was
turned to Rufus, she spoke. "Am I a disgrace to him?" she asked, in
tones so faint that he could barely hear them. "I have had my fears of
it, before now."

If he had been less fond of Amelius, his natural kindness of heart might
have kept him silent. Even as it was, he made no direct reply. "You
remember how you were living when Amelius first met with you?" was all
he said.

The sad blue eyes looked at him in patient sorrow; the low sweet voice
answered--"Yes." Only a look and a word--only the influence of an
instant--and, in that instant, Rufus's last doubts of her vanished!

"Don't think I say it reproachfully, my child! I know it was not your
fault; I know you are to be pitied, and not blamed."

She turned her face towards him--pale, quiet, and resigned. "Pitied, and
not blamed," she repeated. "Am I to be forgiven?"

He shrank from answering her. There was silence.

"You said just now," she went on, "that I looked like a different girl,
since you last saw me. I _am_ a different g