ee!"

"Claudia, dear Claudia, what is the matter with you? What can I do for
you?"

"Receive my confidence, that is all. Hear my confession. I must tell
somebody or die. I wish I was a Catholic, and had a father confessor who
would hear me and comfort me, and absolve my sins, and keep my secrets!"

"Can any man stand in that relation to a woman except her father, if she
is single, or her husband, if she is married?" asked Bee.

"I don't know--and I don't care! Only when I passed by St. Patrick's
Church, with this load of trouble on my soul, I felt as if it would have
done me good to steal into one of those veiled recesses and tell the
good old father there!"

"You could have told your heavenly Father anywhere."

"He knows it already; but I durst not pray to him! I am not so impious
as that either. I have not presumed to pray for a month--not since my
betrothal."

"You have not presumed to pray. Oh, Claudia!"

"How should I dare to pray, after I had deliberately sold myself to the
demon--after I had deliberately determined to sin and take the wages of
sin?"

"Claudia! Oh, Heaven! You are certainly mad!"

"I know it; but the knowledge does not help me to the cure. I have been
mad a month!" Then breaking forth into a wail of woe, she cried: "Oh,
Bee! I do not love that man! I do not love him! and the idea of marrying
him appalls my very soul!"

"Good Heaven, Claudia, then why--" begun Bee, but Claudia fiercely
continued:

"I loathe him! I sicken at him! His first kiss! Oh, Bee! the cold,
clammy touch of those lips struck all the color from my face forever, I
think! I loathe him!"

"Oh, Claudia, Claudia, why, in the name of all that is wise and good,
do you do yourself, and him, too, such a terrible wrong as to marry
him?" inquired the deeply-shocked maiden.

"Because I must! Because I will! I have deliberately determined to be a
peeress of England, and I will be one, whatever the cost."

"But oh! have you thought of the deadly sin--the treachery, the perjury,
the sacrilege; oh! and the dreadful degradation of such a loveless
marriage?"

"Have I thought of these things--these horrors? Yes; witness this
tortured heart and racked brain of mine!"

"Then why, oh, why, Claudia, do you persevere?"

"I am in the vortex of the whirlpool, and cannot stop myself!"

"Then let me stop you. My weak hand is strong enough for that. Remain
here, dear Claudia. Let me go downstairs and report that you are ill, as
in