ng of
her."

"Bitter! I tell you that I think her quite right in what she does.
If a woman cannot love, what better can she do than trade upon her
beauty? But, there; let her go; I did not wish to speak of her."

"I was very wrong in asking you to walk with me this morning."

"No, Adela, not wrong; but very, very right. There, well, I will not
ask you for your hand again, though it was but in friendship."

"In friendship I will give it you," and she stretched out her hand to
him. It was ungloved, and very white and fair; a prettier hand than
even Caroline could boast.

"I must not take it. I must not lie to you, Adela. I am
broken-hearted. I have loved; I have loved that woman with all my
heart, with my very soul, with the utmost strength of my whole
being--and now it has come to this. If I know what a broken heart
means, I have it here. But yet--yet--yet. Oh, Adela! I would fain try
yet once again. I can do nothing for myself; nothing. If the world
were there at my feet, wealth, power, glory, to be had for the
stooping, I would not stoop to pick them, if I could not share them
with--a friend. Adela, it is so sad to be alone!"

"Yes, it is sad. Is not sadness the lot of many of us?"

"Yes; but nature bids us seek a cure when a cure is possible."

"I do not know what you wish me to understand, Mr. Bertram?"

"Yes, Adela, you do; I think you do. I think I am honest and open. At
any rate, I strive to be so. I think you do understand me."

"If I do, then the cure which you seek is impossible."

"Ah!"

"Is impossible."

"You are not angry with me?"

"Angry; no, not angry."

"And do not be angry now, if I speak openly again. I thought--I
thought. But I fear that I shall pain you."

"I do not care for pain if any good can come of it."

"I thought that you also had been wounded. In the woods, the stricken
harts lie down together and lick each other's wounds while the herd
roams far away from them."

"Is it so? Why do we hear then 'of the poor sequestered stag, left
and abandoned of his velvet friend?' No, Mr. Bertram, grief, I fear,
must still be solitary."

"And so, unendurable."

"God still tempers the wind to the shorn lamb, now as he has ever
done. But there is no sudden cure for these evils. The time will come
when all this will be remembered, not without sorrow, but with a
calm, quiet mourning that will be endurable; when your heart, now
not broken as you say, but tortured, will be able to recei