. Now he
may marry her, for all I care, and I wish him no worse punishment.
I shall go to my room now and write to her that everything is over
between us. The fact is, Madge, you spoiled Miss Wildmere for me on
that morning drive the other day. After leaving your society and going
into hers I felt the difference keenly, and while I should then have
fulfilled the obligations which I had so stupidly incurred, I had
little heart in the affair. Her acting was consummate, but a true
woman's nature had been revealed to me, and the glamour was gone from
the false one. Now you see what absolute confidence I repose in you,
and how heavily this strange story bears against myself. Could I have
given it to any one for whom I had not a brother's love, and in whom I
did not hope to find a sister's gentle charity? I show you how unspent
is the force of all those years when we had scarcely a thought which
we could not tell each other. I have little claim, though, to be a
protecting brother, when I have been making such an egregious fool of
myself. You have grown wiser and stronger than I. You won't think very
harshly of me, will you, Madge?"

"No, Graydon."

"And you won't condemn my fraternal affection as contrary to nature?"

She was sorely at a loss. She had listened with quickened breath, a
fluttering pulse, and in a growing tumult of hope and fear, to this
undisguised revelation of his attitude toward her. She almost thought
that she detected between the lines, as it were, the beginning of a
different regard. He believed that he had been frankness itself,
and his words proved that he looked upon his fraternal affection and
confidence as the natural, the almost inevitable, sequence of the
past. She could not meet him on the fraternal ground that he was
taking again, nor did she wish him to occupy it in his own mind. To
maintain the attitude which she had adopted would require as much
delicacy as firmness of action, or he would begin to query why she
could not go back to their old relations as readily as he could. She
had listened to the twice-told tale of the events of the past few
days with almost breathless interest, because his words revealed
the workings of his own mind, and she had not the least intention
of permitting him to settle down into the tranquil affection of a
brother.

While she hesitated, he asked, gently, "Don't you feel a little of
your old sisterly love for me?"

"No, Graydon, I do not," she replied, bold