eft you. There never can be anything between us."

"Why, Lucy? Tell me why! Do not sit there holding yourself as if
you were apart from me and mine."

"You have just said the very words which explain it all," she
answered. "I am indeed 'apart from you and yours.' Your explanation
now makes clear why you did not seek me out on your return, and I
accept it fully. But think you for a moment that this wipes out
all I have suffered through these years? Can you explain away, by
any other statement, save that I was 'apart from you and yours.'
the cruel wrong you did when you left me, a helpless girl without
experience, in a position where I was utterly defenceless against
evil tongues in the hour of my trial; so that what should have been
my glory was turned into a load of disgrace which crushed me and
killed my mother? To say you intended to return is no answer, no
defence. You knew all about a world of which I was ignorant, and
you should have shielded me by your knowledge.

"Do not think I am unhuman, I am simply unfeeling on the side to
which you would appeal. I have lived too long alone, I have suffered
too much alone, to look to any human creature for such help or such
comfort as you would bring. I know you were honest, I know you were
loving and tender, but that has all passed for me. You do not come
into my life at any point; I can look on you without a throb of my
heart either in love or in hate--"

"But, Lucy, I am not changed. I am the same Hugh Maxwell you knew."

"You are Hugh Maxwell--but there is no question of likeness, of
being the same, for there is no Lucy. She is as really dead to you
to-day as you thought when you mourned her six years ago. The
'Mistress Routh' who speaks now is a widow, by God's grace a member
of the Society of Methodists, and you need never seek through her
to find any trace of the girl you knew. She is dead, dead, dead,
and may the Lord have mercy on her soul!"

It was like standing before a closed grave.

Against this all my prayers, my tears, my entreaties, availed
nothing, until at last I ceased in very despair at the firmness of
this unmovable woman, whom I had left a pretty, wilful, changeable
girl a few years before.

The candle had long since burned itself out, and the gray of the
morning was beginning to struggle in at every opening when I gave
up the contest.

"Mistress Routh," said I, smiling at the odd address, "I have been
overlong in coming to my business. I am