sh girl met as Sister Magdalen,
his mother, is near.

He looks up; his eyes fall upon a face that boasts of extreme beauty, a
face of wondrous black eyes and cheeks aflame, a face that, set in sable
coils of hair, would drive an artist wild with the desire to transfer
its charms to canvas.

And John Craig, strange man, frowns.

Evidently there is something in his composition that prevents him from
accepting what the prodigal gods have thrown in his path.

"You?" he says, bluntly, and with disdain.

The woman with the black eyes smiles sweetly as she continues to
soothingly touch his forehead, which throbs and burns as though he
endures the keenest pain.

"Did you imagine it could be any other, my dear John? You deserted me,
but I believe you failed to know your own mind. At any rate I have
determined not to desert you."

"Pauline, you do not--it is impossible for you to care for me after what
has happened."

"Impossible! Why should it be? I can't help myself. I have seen others
profess to love me, have played with them as a queen might with her
subjects who prostrated themselves before her. Yet, John Craig, I never
loved but once. You have stirred my heart to its depths. I am not able
to analyze these feelings. I only know what I know."

She does not feel the modesty of a young girl; much acting before the
public has made her brazen, this midnight beauty with the glowing eyes
black as sloes, the pouting lips, the figure of a Hebe.

John Craig may have seen adventures before in his life, and probably has
been in many a fix, being fond of spending his vacations in rambling
over the wilderness away up in the Michigan peninsula, with a gun on his
shoulder; but plainly he has now met the crisis of his whole career.

"Pauline, I am a frank fellow, as you know. It is not in me to dissemble.
I am going to speak plainly with you," he says, rising to a sitting
posture, and looking the actress full in the eyes.

She moves uneasily, and her cheeks, which were erstwhile tinted with
scarlet, grow pallid. Then she sets her teeth and with a smile continues:

"That is right, I hate a deceiver worse than anything else on earth. It
was your honest way, John Craig, that first drew me toward you. Yes,
speak your mind."

Evidently she is in part prepared for the worst, though she has hoped
that the old witchery might be thrown about the young doctor.

"When you treated me in that merciless way, long ago, the regard I felt