in the world who could ever
stir his pulses.

And so silent now--so beautiful? If she had spoken in her customary
formal, friendly way, it would have broken the spell. But she could
not. The chain was as fast round her at that moment, though she longed
to speak.

She could not, for she knew how he loved her; how his touch stirred each
pulse; that this man was all in all to her--the one she loved, and she
could not turn and flee.

At last, by a tremendous effort, she raised her eyes to his to speak
indifferently and break through this horrible feeling of dread and
lassitude, but as their eyes met, her hands dropped from the keys, as,
with a passionate cry, he took a step forward, caught her to his breast,
and she lay for the moment trembling there, and felt his lips pressed to
her in a wild, passionate kiss.

"Myra!" he panted; "all that must be as a dream. You are not his. It
is impossible. I love you--my own! my own!"

His words thrilled her, but their import roused in her as well those
terrible thoughts of the tie which bound her; and, with a cry of anger
and despair, she thrust him away.

"Go!" she cried; "it is an insult. You must be mad."

Then, with the calm majesty of an injured woman proud of her honour and
her state, she said coldly, as she pointed to the door:

"Mr Stratton, you have taken a cruel advantage of my loneliness here.
I am Mr Barron's wife. Go, sir. We are friends no longer and can
never meet again."

CHAPTER TWENTY.

THE MORNING PAPER.

No one by any stretch of the imagination could have called the admiral a
good reader. In fact, a person might very well have been considered to
be strictly within the limits of truth if he had declared the old
officer to be the worst reader he ever heard. But so it was, from the
crookedness of human nature, that he always made a point of reading
every piece of news in the paper which he considered interesting, aloud,
for the benefit of those with him at the breakfast table.

Matters happen strangely quite as frequently as they go on in the
regular groove of routine, and hence it happened, one morning at
breakfast, that is to say, on the morning after the tragedy at the
convict prison, that Sir Mark put on his gold spectacles as soon as he
had finished his eggs and bacon and one cup of coffee, and, taking the
freshly aired paper, opened it with a good deal of rustling noise, and
coughed.

Edie looked across at her cousin with a misch