nice sat
down upon a plank seat.

"Your marriage," she said, "seemed always to me a piece of quixotism.
I never altogether understood it."

"It was an affair of impulse," he said, slowly. "Life from a personal
point of view had lost all interest to me. I did not dream after
my--shall we call it apostacy?--that I could rely upon even a modicum
of your friendship. I looked upon myself as an outcast commencing life
afresh. Then chance intervened. I thought I saw my way to making some
atonement to a woman whose life I had certainly helped to ruin. That was
where the serious part of the mistake came. I thought what I had to offer
would be sufficient. I am beginning now to doubt it."

"And what are you going to do?" she asked, looking steadily away from
him.

"Heaven knows," he answered, bitterly. "I cannot give what I do not
possess."

Was it his fancy, or was there a gleam of satisfaction about her still,
pale face? He went on.

"I don't want to play the hypocrite. On the other hand I don't want all
that I have done to go for nothing. Can you advise me?"

"No, nor any one else," she answered, softly.

"Yet I can perhaps correct a little your point of view. I think that you
overestimate your indebtedness to the woman whom you have made your wife.
Her husband was a weak, dissipated creature and he was a doomed man long
before that unfortunate day. It is even very questionable whether that
scene in which you figured had anything whatever to do in hastening his
death. That is a good many years ago, and ever since then you seem to
have impoverished yourself to find her the means to live in luxury. I
consider that you paid your debt over and over again, and that your final
act of self-abnegation was entirely uncalled for. What more she wants
from you I do not know. Perhaps I can imagine."

There was a moment's silence. She turned her head and looked at
him--looked him in the eyes unshamed, yet with her secret shining there
for him to see.

"There may be others, Lawrence," she said, "to whom you owe something. A
woman cannot take back what she has given. There may be sufferers in the
world whom you ought also to consider. And a woman loves to think that
what she may not have herself is at least kept sacred--to her memory."

"Fore!" cried Lord Redford, who had found his ball. "Awfully decent of
you people to wait so long. We were afraid you meant to claim the hole!"

Mannering rose to play his shot.

"The Duchess a