ld not." This is the one rebuke
she cannot refrain from.

Georgie laughs unpleasantly, and then, all in a little moment, she
varies the performance by bursting into a passionate and most
unlooked-for flood of tears.

"Don't talk to me of love!" she cries, miserably. "It is useless. I
don't believe in it. It is a delusion, a mere mockery, a worn-out
superstition. You will tell me that Dorian loved me; and yet in the
very early days before our marriage, when his so-called love must have
been at its height, he insulted me beyond all forgiveness."

"You are making yourself wretched about nothing," says Clarissa,
kneeling beside her, and gently drawing her head down on her shoulder.
"Don't, darling,--don't cry like that. I know, I feel, all will come
right in the end. Indeed, unless Dorian were to come to me and say, 'I
have done this hateful thing,' I should not believe it."

"I would give all the world to be able to say that from my heart,"
says Mrs. Branscombe, with excessive sadness.

"Try to think it. Afterwards belief will be easy. Oh, Georgie, do not
nourish hard thoughts; tear them from your heart, and by and by, when
all this is explained away, think how glad you will be that, without
proof, you had faith in him. Do you know, unless my own eyes saw it, I
should never for any reason lose faith in Horace."

A tender, heavenly smile creeps round her beautiful lips as she says
this. Georgie, seeing it, feels heart-broken. Oh that she could have
faith like this!

"It is too late," she says, bitterly: "and I deserve all I have got. I
myself have been the cause of my own undoing. I married Dorian for no
other reason than to escape the drudgery of teaching. Yet now"--with a
sad smile--"I know there are worse things than Murray's Grammar. I am
justly punished." Her lovely face is white with grief. I have tried,
_tried_, TRIED to disbelieve, but nothing will raise this cloud of
suspicion from my breast. It weighs me down and crushes me more
cruelly day by day. "I wish--I wish"--cries poor little Georgie, from
her very soul--"that I had never been born, because I shall never know
a happy moment again."

The tears run silently down her cheeks one by one. She puts up her
small hands to defend herself, and the action is pitiable in the
extreme.

"How happy you were only a month ago!" says Clarissa, striken with
grief at the sight of her misery.

"Yes, I have had my day, I suppose," says Mrs. Branscombe, wearily.
"On