ed frankly and pleasantly. Two days
after I was going to the City on madame's business. He met me. He said
he had watched for me. There! I cannot go into details. We met
repeatedly. For the first time in my life I was sought, and, as I
believed, warmly loved. I knew the unspeakable gulf that opened for me,
but I loved him. At last there was light and color in my
poverty-stricken existence." She stopped, and a glow came into her sad
eyes. "I was bewildered, distracted, between the passion of my heart and
the resistance of my reason. I ceased to be the efficient assistant I
had been. I was rebuked, and looked upon coldly. Six months after I had
met _him_ first, I gave madame warning. I said I was going into the
country. So I was, but not alone. No one asked me any questions; no one
had a right. I belonged to no one, was responsible to no one, could
wound no one. I was quite alone, and, oh, so hungry for a little love
and joy!" She paused, and then resumed rapidly, "I was that man's
unwedded wife for nearly two years." She rested her arm on the table,
and hid her face with her hand.

Katherine listened with unspeakable emotion. The eloquent blood flushed
cheek and throat with a keen sense of shame. She had read and heard of
such painful stories, but to be face to face with a creature who had
crossed the Rubicon, overpassed the great gulf, which separates the
sheep from the goats was something so unexpected, so terrible, that she
could not restrain a passionate burst of tears. "Ah," she murmured at
last, "you were cruelly deceived, no doubt. You are too hard upon
yourself. You----"

"No, Miss Liddell; I am trying to tell you the whole truth. The man I
loved never deceived me--never held put any hope that we could marry. He
was not rich; there were impediments--what, I never knew. But I thought
such love as he professed, and at the time felt for me, would last; and
so long as he was mine, I wanted nothing more. Have you patience to hear
more, or have I fallen too low to retain your interest?"

"Ah, no! tell me everything."

"I was very happy--oh, intensely happy for a while. Then a tiny cloud of
indifference, thin and shifting like morning mist, rose between us. It
darkened and lowered. He was a hasty, masterful man, but he was never
rough to me. Gradually I came to see that time had changed me from a joy
to a burden. How was it I lived? How was it I shut my eyes and hoped? At
last he told me he was obliged to go abroad,