oking in her eyes, said fervently:

"Then take my name, Christine. Let me give you a home and friends, and
call you by the name I bear. God knows I would feel honored in bestowing
it upon you. If you will commit your precious life into my keeping--if
you will marry me--"

The look of her eyes checked him. The meaning of his words had dawned
upon her slowly, and to his infinite distress he saw that they filled
her with pain.

"You are speaking out of pity for me. You think I would die beneath it,
unless you sacrificed yourself and gave me the protection of your name,"
she said, speaking almost eagerly. "Tell me this is so. But you do not
know how I feel. I can bear it somehow, or else I can die. I could never
accept such a sacrifice from you, and, oh, I could never think of
marriage again, even to the best and noblest creature on God's earth,
without a shrinking that is pain intolerable."

Noel saw he had made a mistake. He saw, too, that the only way out of it
was to let her put this interpretation on it. So he merely soothed and
comforted her, and told her things should be as she chose, and then he
tied her bonnet under her chin as if she had been a little girl, gave
her her gloves, lowered the veil before her face and asked her if she
were ready.

"You will take your sweet girl-name," he said, "and be known as Mrs.
Verrone. Only Mrs. Murray and I will know anything of your past, and we
will now turn that page, Christine, and go forth into a new world--and a
brighter one, please God."

XII.

Christine was ill for many weeks, with Dr. Belford in daily attendance,
and her faithful old Eliza to help Mrs. Murray with the nursing. All
during the long fever, the gentle, little old lady, to whom Noel had
confided her, watched and tended her with a mother's devotion and love.
The patient was far too ill to protest, and very soon she learned to
lean upon and love Mrs. Murray as though she had indeed been her mother.
Again poor Noel felt himself banished, ignored and excluded, as he alone
was kept away from her, but his care for her was so supremely above his
care for himself that he never made a complaint.

He had learned from Eliza--whose mouth was shut so tight to the other
servants that she went among them almost like a dumb woman--that on the
day of his making the announcement concerning her husband to Christine,
a messenger had brought Dallas a note, after reading which he had
hurriedly put a few things i