taken feeling of pity I refrained), that your mere
touch _sickened_ me? Then you stooped, and he thought--you know
what he thought--and yet," cries Molly, with a gesture of aversion,
"how could he have thought it possible that I should allow _you_
of _all men_ to--kiss me?"

"Why speak of what I so well know?" interrupts he hoarsely, with bent
head and averted eyes. "You seldom spare me. You are angered, and for
what? Because you still hanker after a man who flung you away,--you,
for whose slightest wish I would risk my all. For a mere chimera, a
fancy, a fear only half developed, he renounced you."

"Say nothing more," says Molly, with pale lips and eyes large and dark
through regretful sorrow; "not another word. I think he acted rightly.
He thought I was false, and so thinking he was right to renounce. I do
not say this in his defense or because--or for any reason only----" She
pauses.

"Why not continue? Because you--love him still."

"Well, and why not?" says Molly. "Why should I deny my love for him?
Can any shame be connected with it? Yes," murmurs she, her sweet eyes
filling with tears, her small clasped hands trembling, "though he and I
can never be more to each other than we now are, I tell you I love him
as I never have and never shall love again."

"It is a pity that such love as yours should have no better return,"
says he, with an unlovely laugh. "Luttrell appears to bear his fate
with admirable equanimity."

"You are incapable of judging such a nature as his," returns she,
disdainfully. "He is all that is gentle, and true, and noble: while
you----" She stops abruptly, causing a pause that is more eloquent than
words, and, with a distant bow, hurries from the room.

Philip's star to-day is not in the ascendant. Even as he stands crushed
by Molly's bitter reproaches, Marcia, with her heart full of a settled
revenge toward him, is waiting outside her grandfather's door for
permission to enter.

That unlucky shadow of a kiss last night has done as much mischief as
half a dozen real kisses. It has convinced Marcia of the truth of that
which for weeks she has been vainly struggling to disbelieve, namely,
Philip's mad infatuation for Molly.

Now all doubt is at an end, and in its place has fallen a despair more
terrible than any uncertainty.

All the anguish of a heart rejected, that is still compelled to live on
loving its rejector, has been hers for the past two months, and it has
told upon her slo