the wall and stared at her, absolutely
speechless with surprise and horror, while she continued her sewing
without a second look, though I could mark her hands were trembling
so she could hardly direct her needle.

"Good God! Lucy! Is it really you?" I cried, scarce believing the
evidence of my senses.

"I am she whom you name."

"And you know me?"

"I know that you are Hugh Maxwell," she answered, in the same steady
voice.

"And you know that I am your husband."

"I have no husband. My husband is dead."

"Lucy, do not break my heart! I am not a scoundrel! Do you think
for a moment I could abandon the girl who trusted and married me?
I had the most positive intelligence of your death. Lucy, Lucy,
for God's sake speak, and do not torture me beyond endurance. Tell
me what has happened."

But the trembling hands went on with their task, though she neither
raised her head nor spake. My brain was in a whirl, and I did not
know what to think or how to act, so I preserved at least an outward
quiet for a time, trying to imagine her position.

I was but eighteen when I had married her, a tradesman's daughter,
but my uncertain allowance, as well as the certain wrath of my
family, prevented me acknowledging her as my wife, and no one except
her mother knew of our union.

As I sate trying to find some light, I heard the cry of a lusty
child: "Mother! Mother!" At this her face contracted as with sudden
pain, and saying only, "Wait where you are," she left the shop.

I noticed she had still the same quick, light way of moving, "like
a bird," I used to tell her in the old days: it was but the dull,
ungenerous colour and shape of her stuff gown that hid the dainty
figure I had known, and only some different manner of dressing her
hair that prevented the old trick of the little curls that would
come out about her ears and forehead.

While she was away I thought it all out, and my heart melted with
pity for the poor soul, forced to these years of loneliness, to
this daily struggle for the support of herself and her child--our
child--and, more than all else, to the torturing thought that the
love which had been the sum of her existence was false. What should
I do? Could I be in doubt for a moment? I would make up to her, by
the devotion of a heart rich in feeling, all the sorrows of the
past.

Here she entered again, but now collected and herself as at first.
I rose and advanced to meet her, but she waved me off, and t