se
delicious fragrance had already pervaded the room. They stood side by
side, yet she shrank farther, and kept her face averted, shivering
perceptibly. Lifting one arm he drew down the sash to shut out the
freezing air.

"You are resolved neither to look at nor speak to me? So be it. At
least you must listen to me. You may not care to hear that I have been
absent, but perhaps it will interest you to know that I went in search
of the man for whose crime you are paying the penalty."

If he expected her to wince under the probe, her nerves were taut, and
she defied the steel; but the face she now turned fully to him was so
blanched by illness, so hopeless in its rigid calm, that he felt a keen
pain at his own heart.

"Prisoners, victims of justice, have, it seems, no privileges; else my
one request, my earnest prayer to be shielded from your presence, might
have protected me from this intrusion. Are you akin to Parrhasius that
you come to gloat over the agonies of a moral and mental vivisection?
The sight of suffering to which you have brought a helpless woman, is
scarcely the recompense I was taught to suppose agreeable to a
chivalrous Southern gentleman. If, wearing the red livery of Justice,
undue zeal for vengeance betrayed you into the fatal mistake of
trampling me into this horrible place, there might be palliation; but
for the brutal persistency with which you thrust your tormenting
presence upon me, not even heavenly charity could possibly find pardon.
Literally you are heaping insult upon awful injury. Is it a refinement
of cruelty that brings you here to watch and analyze my suffering, as a
biologist looks through lenses at an insect he empales, or Pasteur
scrutinizes the mortal throes of the victims into whose veins he has
injected poison?"

If she had drawn a lash across his face, it would not have stung more
keenly than her words, so expressive of detestation.

"Will you consider for a moment the possibility that other motives
actuate me; that ceaseless regret, remorse, if you choose, for a
terrible mistake, impels me to come here in the hope of making
reparation?"

"Such a supposition is as inconceivable as the idea of reparation. When
a reaper goes forth to his ripe harvest, his lawful labor, and wantonly
turns aside into a by-path, to try the edge of his sickle on an humble,
unoffending stalk that fights for life among the grass and weeds, and
struggles to get its head sufficiently in the sunshine