s have been said frequently,
and stranger ones have come to pass. Mr. Bainrothe is certainly a
splendid financier, that was your own father's opinion. You will never
marry any man who will take better care of your money, and that is a
consideration with you, or ought to be, Miriam. Your estate is your
chief distinction, child, if you only knew it; besides, with a knowledge
of your constitutional malady, you should be very careful what hands you
fall into. No woman that I know of demands such peculiar care and
tenderness from a husband, nor such choice in her surroundings. After
all, Mr. Bainrothe is still a very handsome man, and admirably well
preserved if not exactly young; he does not look forty, he has not a
gray hair, a false tooth, nor a wrinkle."

"Have you done, Evelyn Erie?" I asked, almost ferociously. "Have you
completed your catalogue of insult? Then listen, in turn, to my counsel.
Marry him yourself by all means; he would suit you, body and soul, far
better than me. Indeed, I have never seen any one else who seemed so
thoroughly your counterpart, match and mate, as Cagliostro!"

"Thank you," she said, furiously; "if I thought you were in
earnest"--here she hesitated, clinching her hand, and biting her white
lips.

"I am in earnest," I rejoined, quietly; "what then?" and I looked
coldly, resolutely in her face.

"Why I would perhaps marry the son, just to correct your fallacious idea
about the father, that is all! This course is shut out from you,
however, entirely, by your own folly, so _you_ must take what you can
get now, for Claude Bainrothe, let me assure you, is lost to you
forever." And she went out, smiling triumphantly.

I suspected from that hour what I knew later, and I had suffered the
last pang to agonize my heart that my broken troth should ever cost me.
The corpse of my dead love had bled at the touch of its murderer, in
accordance with ancient superstition. Now, calm and quiet oblivion and
the sepulchre should surround and enshroud it forever more.

I think I kept my determination bravely from that hour, but others must
judge of this for me. We are not gods, to say to the tide of feeling,
"Thus far, and no farther shalt thou come." We are only mortal Canutes
at best, to lift back our chairs as the tide advances, and seat
ourselves securely thereon beyond the surf. We all remember how it fared
with the quaint old monarch and moralist when he tried the plan of the
immortals, and commande