think, my only love, that in
what you have done for this stranger, you have acted not only with the
goodness, but with the wisdom of an angel," replied Lyon Berners,
snatching her suddenly to his heart, and holding her closely there while
he pressed kiss after kiss upon her crimson lip; and murmured:

"I must steal a kiss from these sweet lips when and wherever I can, my
own one, since we are not to be much alone together now."

And then he released her, and hurried off to put on his overcoat.

Sybil stood for a minute, smiling, where he had left her, and so happy
that she forgot she had to get ready to go. The pain was gone from her
heart, and the cloud from her brain.

And as yet, so little did she know of herself or others, that she could
not have told why the pain and the cloud ever came, or why they ever
went away.

As yet she did not know that her husband's admiring smiles given to a
rival beauty had really caused her nameless suffering; or that it was
his loving caresses, bestowed upon herself, that had soothed it.

In a word, Sybil Berners, the young bride, did not dream that the
bitter, bitter seed of JEALOUSY was germinating in her heart, to grow
and spread perhaps into a deadly upas of the soul, destroying all moral
life around it.

CHAPTER VII.

DOWN IN THE DARK VALE.

Where rose the mountains, there for her were friends,
Where fell the valley, therein was her home;
Where the steep rock and dizzy peak ascends,
She had the passion and the power to roam.
The crag, the forest, cavern, torrent's foam,
Were unto her companions, and they spake
A natural language clearer than the tone
Of her best books, which she would oft forsake
For Nature's pages, lit by moonbeams on the lake.--BYRON.

Jealousy, once called to life in any human heart, is not easily to be
destroyed. Sybil Berners' almost unconscious jealousy suddenly called
into existence, and as suddenly soothed to sleep, was awakened again by
something that occurred just as the travellers were about to start.

It was the merest trifle, yet one of those trifles which turn the course
of fate just as surely as the little switch of the railroad controls the
direction of the train.

The travellers were just entering the stage-coach. Mr. Berners handed
in first Mrs. Blondelle, t