soft. What a fool he had
been, that day in the train, not to connect the girl's change of colour
with his mention of O'Reilly! She might have blurted out her compliment
to excuse the blush, instead of the blush having followed the
compliment. Good heavens! could Justin O'Reilly have been the man from
whom she wished to hide?

"Perhaps the name you spoke in your sleep was O'Reilly!" he flung at his
wife.

Beverley gathered herself together.

"So all this time," she said, "you have been suspicious of me! And I was
so happy. I thought you were happy, too, but it's just as I was afraid
it would be, if I married you. You can't endure the strain!"

"I have endured the strain," Roger defended himself; "because I loved
you as few men have ever loved, but the question is, have you deserved
it all?"

"This is the moment I felt must come!" she said. "If I had only myself
to think of, don't you know I'd have told you everything? I warned you
how it would be ... how I should have to keep the secret not for a
little while, but for always! If you don't believe, if you think I lied
when I said no man had ever been anything to me ... if you think I lie
now, when I say I never saw or heard of this girl till I found her in
the street.... I can go out of your life.... I can go to-day!"

As she spoke slowly, sentence by sentence, with a sobbing breath
between, Beverley looked straight into her husband's eyes. Hers did not
falter though they swam in tears. With her last words, she rose and
stood facing him as he sat at his desk.

Roger gave her back gaze for gaze, as if he would read her secret
written in cypher on her soul. He saw that she meant what she said. A
word from him, and their experiment was at an end. She would go. It
seemed to him that never had her beauty been so gentle, so womanly.

"You shan't go!" he cried, springing to his feet. "I can't give you up!"

But she held him off.

"No!" she panted. "I won't stay if you want me only in that way--because
you have a kind of love for me, whether you believe in me or not. I love
you too much to be shamed by you! Either you trust me, or you don't. Say
which it is, and I'll stay, or go."

"I've got to trust you! I do!" The words seemed to burst from him. "You
know I love you more than all the world. It would kill me to lose you."

"I'd rather die from the shock of losing you, Roger, than from such a
hateful pain, going on and on----"

"It shan't go on," he said. "I've be