ot
addressed to the guilty alone, Mr. Siward."

"Oh, yes, of course. As for the balanced capacity for good and evil, how
about the inherited desire for the latter?"

"Who is free from that, too? Do you suppose anybody really desires to be
good?"

"You mean most people are so afraid not to be, that virtue becomes a
habit?"

"Perhaps. It's a plain business proposition anyway. It pays."

"Celestial insurance?" he asked, laughing.

"I don't know, Mr. Siward; do you?"

But he, turning to the sea, had become engrossed in his own thoughts
again; and again she was first curious, then impatient at the ease with
which he excluded her. She remembered, too, that the cart was waiting;
that she had scarcely time now to make the train.

She stood irresolute, inert, disinclined to bestir herself. An
inborn aptitude for drifting, which threatened to become a talent
for indecision, had always alternated in her with sudden impulsive
conclusions; and when her pride was involved, in decisions which
sometimes scarcely withstood the analysis of reason.

Physically healthy, mentally unawakened, sentimentally incredulous,
totally ignorant of any master passion, and conventionally drilled, her
beauty and sweet temper had carried her easily on the frothy crest of
her first season, over the eligible and ineligible alike, leaving her at
Lenox, a rather tired and breathless girl, in love with pleasure and the
world which treated her so well.

The death of her mother abroad had made little impression upon her--her
uncle, Major Belwether, having cared for her since her father's death
when she was ten years old. So, although the scandal of her mother's
self-exile had been in a measure condoned by a tardy marriage to the man
for whom she had left everything, her daughter had grown up ignorant of
any particular feeling for a mother she could scarcely remember.

However, she wore black and went nowhere for the second winter, during
which time she learned a great deal concerning the unconventional
proclivities of the women of her race and family, enough to impress her
so seriously that on an exaggerated impulse she had come to one of her
characteristic decisions.

That decision was to break the unsavoury record at the first justifiable
opportunity. And the opportunity came in the shape of Quarrier. As
though wedlock were actually the sanctuary which an alarmed nation
pretends it to be!

Now, approaching the threshold of a third and last se