usly on our betrothal, which, owing to our youth, it was
understood, should continue a year. In the interval I was to travel with
my father to the different large cities of the Union which I had never
seen, and abide awhile in Washington.

His health, Dr. Pemberton thought, required this change, but a darker
one was in store for him.

On Christmas-day, of that year, he was smitten with paralysis, and his
decline was sure and rapid from that hour. Let me pass over the agony of
that period of six weeks, lengthened into years by the dread tension of
anxiety, most relentless of the furies. But for the confidence I felt in
Claude's affection, and the vista of hope it opened for me, I think I
should have succumbed under the unequal struggle.

During this period, his attentions to me and to my helpless father were
most kind and assiduous. Mr. Bainrothe and Evelyn, too, between whom
some unexplained alienation had existed for some time, met in apparent
harmony above his bed of death.

In addition to the services of our own dear and valued physician, we had
others of eminence coming and going daily, with the knowledge in their
own breasts that all was vain.

Still I never ceased entirely to hope until the very last. "He is not
old, he is still vigorous," I would say to myself. "There may be--there
_must_ be--reaction. I have so often heard him boast of his English
constitution, I cannot, oh, I cannot think that the end is yet!"

I wondered then at the inattention of the Stanburys, in whose
disinterested friendship I had reposed so much confidence, even though a
shadow of late had been thrown over our intercourse by my engagement
with Claude Bainrothe, a shadow of which I thought I saw the substance
in the bitter jealousy and rancorous, unreasonable love and hatred of
the morbid George Gaston.

Later I found by the merest accident, through one note of his that had
been left in a drawer of a desk long disused, that Mr. Gerald Stanbury
and Evelyn had maintained a rather fierce correspondence on the subject
of her refusal to accept his services at my father's pillow; founded, as
she alleged, on the recent unexplained but deep-rooted aversion Mr.
Monfort seemed to have imbibed for his neighbor and friend, and which
his physicians said must be regarded.

Allusion was made, not unmixed with bitterness, in Mr. Stanbury's note,
to this assertion of hers, which he pronounced, if true, to rest on the
misrepresentations of villains