ll it to me--and how gentle you were with me, when papa
died--and the hundred pound note? Do you remember coming to Castle
Marling?--and my promise to be your wife--and the first kiss you left
upon my lips? And, oh, Archibald! Do you remember the loving days after
I was your wife--how happy we were with each other? Do you remember
when Lucy was born, we thought I should have died; and your joy, your
thankfulness that God restored me? Do you remember all this?"

Aye. He did remember it. He took the poor hand into his, and
unconsciously played with its wasted fingers.

"Have you any reproach to cast to me?" he gently said, bending his head
a little.

"Reproach to you! To you, who must be almost without reproach in the
sight of Heaven! You, who were everlasting to me--ever anxious for my
welfare! When I think of what you were, and are, and how I quitted you,
I could sink into the earth with remorse and shame. My own sin, I have
surely expiated; I cannot expiate the shame I entailed upon you, and
upon our children."

Never. He felt it as keenly now as he had felt it then.

"Think what it has been for me!" she resumed, and he was obliged to bend
his ear to catch her gradually weakening tones. "To live in this house
with your wife--to see your love for her--to watch the envied caresses
that once were mine! I never loved you so passionately as I have
done since I lost you. Think what it was to watch William's decaying
strength; to be alone with him in his dying hour, and not to be able to
say he is my child as well as yours! When he lay dead, and the news went
forth to the household, it was _her_ petty grief you soothed, not mine,
his mother's. God alone knows how I have lived through it all; it as
been to me as the bitterness of death."

"Why did you come back?" was the response of Mr. Carlyle.

"I have told you. I could not live, wanting you and my children."

"It was wrong; wrong in all ways."

"Wickedly wrong. You cannot think worse of it than I have done. But
the consequences and the punishment would be mine alone, as long as
I guarded against discovery. I never thought to stop here to die; but
death seems to have come on me with a leap, like it came to my mother."

A pause of labored hard breathing. Mr. Carlyle did not interrupt it.

"All wrong, all wrong," she resumed; "this interview with you, among
the rest. And yet--I hardly know; it cannot hurt the new ties you have
formed, for I am as one dead now to th