o ladies sat with faces averted from each other, in constrained
silence.

Edith Cressage rose at last, and took a few aimless steps, with her
hands at her hair. "Well--I'm embarked--fairly under way!" she said, in
clear-cut, almost provocative tones.

"I don't at all know what to say," her companion replied, slowly. "I
fancy that you exaggerate my disapproval. Perhaps it ought not even to
be called disapproval at all. It is only that I am puzzled--and a little
frightened."

"Oh, I am frightened too," said the other, but with eagerness rather
than trepidation in her voice. "That is why I did not give you the
signal to leave us alone. I couldn't quite get up the nerve for it. But
would you believe it?--that is one of the charms of the thing. There
is an excitement about it that exhilarates me. To get happiness through
terror--you can't understand that, can you?"

"I'm trying. I think I'm beginning to understand," said Miss Madden,
vaguely.

"Did you ever set yourself to comprehending why Marie Stuart married
Bothwell?" asked Edith, looking down upon the other with illuminating
fixity. "You have it all--all there. Marie got tired of the smooth
people, the usual people. There was the promise of adventure, and risk,
and peril, and the grand emotions with the big, dark brute."

"It isn't a happy story--this parallel that you pick out," commented
Celia, absently.

"Happy! Pah!" retorted Edith, with spirit. "Who knows if it wasn't the
only really happy thing in her life? The snobs and prigs all scold
her and preach sermons at her--they did it in her lifetime: they do it
now----" "Oh come, I'm neither a snob nor a prig," put in Celia, looking
up in her turn, and tempering with a smile the energy of her tone--"I
don't blame her for her Bothwell; I don't criticize her. I never was
even able to mind about her killing Darnley. You see I take an extremely
liberal view. One might almost call it broad. But if I had been one of
her ladies--her bosom friends--say Catherine Seton--and she had
talked with me about it--I think I should have confessed to some
forebodings--some little misgivings."

"And do you know what she would have said?" Edith's swift question, put
with a glowing face and a confident voice, had in it the ring of assured
triumph. "She would have answered you: 'My dearest girl, all my life I
have done what other people told me to do. In my childhood I was
given in marriage to a criminal idiot. In my premature wido