oline turned and smiled at Wyvis Brand. She had won her game.

"Of course you will, darling," she said, caressingly. "I did not think
you could have been so wicked as to give us up. Come with me! this is
nor the place for us."

And in the heart-struck silence which fell upon the little group that
she left behind, Lady Caroline gravely bowed and led her weeping
daughter from the room.

"Oh, Margaret, Margaret!" Janetta suddenly cried out; but Margaret never
once looked back. Perhaps if she had seen Wyvis Brand's face just then,
she might have given way. It was a terrible face; hard, bitter,
despairing; with lines of anguish about the mouth, and a lurid light in
the deep-set, haggard-looking eyes. Janetta, in the pity of her heart,
went up to her cousin, and took his clenched hand between her own.

"Wyvis, dear Wyvis," she said, "do not look so. Do not grieve. Indeed,
she could not have been worthy of you, or she would not have done like
this. All women are not like her, Wyvis. Some would have loved you for
yourself."

And there she stopped, crimson and ashamed. For surely she had almost
told him that she loved him!--that secret of which she had long been so
much ashamed, and which had given her so much of grief and pain. But she
attached too much importance to her own vague words. They did not betray
her, and Wyvis scarcely listened to what she said. He broke into a
short, harsh laugh, more hideous than a sob.

"Are not all women like her?" he said. "Then they are worse. She was
innocent, at any rate, if she was weak. But she has sold her soul now,
if she ever had one, to the devil; and, as I would rather be with her in
life and death than anywhere else, I shall make haste to go to the devil
too."

He shook off her detaining hand, and strode to the door. There he
turned, and looked fixedly at his mother.

"It is almost worse to be weak than wicked, I think," he said. "If you
had told me the truth long ago, mother, I should have kept out of this
complication. It's been your fault--my misery and my failure have always
been your fault. It would have been better for me if you had left me to
plough the fields like my father before me. As it is, life's over for me
in this part of the world, and I may as well bid it good-bye."

Before they could stop him, he was gone. And Janetta could not follow,
for Mrs. Brand sank fainting from her chair, and it was long before she
could be recovered from the deathlike swoon into w