m the influence of a dream, Isabel," he
soothingly said; "you have been asleep and are not yet awake. Be still,
and recollection will return to you. There, love; rest upon me."

"To think of her as your wife brings pain enough to kill me," she
continued to reiterate. "Promise me that you will not marry her;
Archibald, promise it!"

"I will promise you anything in reason," he replied, bewildered with her
words, "but I do not know what you mean. There is no possibility of my
marrying any one, Isabel; you are my wife."

"But if I die? I may--you know I may; and many think I shall--do not let
her usurp my place."

"Indeed she shall not--whoever you may be talking of. What have you been
dreaming? Who is it that has been troubling your mind?"

"Archibald, do you need to ask? Did you love no one before you married
me? Perhaps you have loved her since--perhaps you love her still?"

Mr. Carlyle began to discern "method in her madness." He changed his
cheering tone to one of grave earnestness. "Of whom to you speak,
Isabel?"

"Of Barbara Hare."

He knitted his brow; he was both annoyed and vexed. Whatever had put
this bygone nonsense into his wife's head? He quitted the sofa where he
had been supporting her, and stood upright before her, calm, dignified,
almost solemn in his seriousness.

"Isabel, what notion can you possibly have picked up about myself and
Barbara Hare; I never entertained the faintest shadow of love for her,
either before my marriage or since. You must tell me what has given rise
to this idea in your mind."

"But she loved you."

A moment's hesitation; for, of course, Mr. Carlyle was conscious that
she had; but, taking all the circumstances into consideration, more
especially how he learnt the fact, he could not, in honor, acknowledge
it to his wife. "If it was so, Isabel, she was more reprehensibly
foolish than I should have given Barbara's good sense could be; for
a woman may almost as well lose herself as to suffer herself to love
unsought. If she did give her love to me, I can only say, I was entirely
unconscious of it. Believe me, you have as much cause to be jealous of
Cornelia as you have of Barbara Hare."

An impulse rose within her that she would tell him all; the few words
dropped by Susan and Joyce, twelve months before, the conversation she
had just overheard; but in that moment of renewed confidence, it did
appear to her that she must have been very foolish to attach importance
to i