on to-day, and I know everything."

"You have been to Pullingham?" exclaims she, with a little gasp.
"Horace, do not blame me. What was I to do? When she came in here, and
saw me----"

"Clarissa, here?"

"Yes, here. I was afraid to tell you of it before, you seemed so weak,
so fretful. Last Tuesday week--the day you had the sleeping-draught
from Dr. Gregson--she came; she entered the room, she came near you,
she touched you, she would"--faintly--"have kissed you. But how could
I bear that? I stepped forward just in time to prevent her lips from
meeting yours."

"And so," he says, with slow vindictiveness, taking no notice of her
agony, "for the sake of a mere bit of silly sentimentality you spoiled
every prospect I have in life."

"Horace, do not look at me like that," she entreats, painfully.
"Remember all that has passed. If for one moment I went mad and forgot
all, am I so much to be blamed? You had been mine--altogether
mine--for so long that I had not strength in one short moment to
relinquish you. When she would have kissed you, it seemed to me more
than I could endure."

"Was it? It is but a little part of what you will have to endure for
the future," he says, brutally. "You have wilfully ruined me, and must
take the consequences. My marriage with Clarissa Peyton would have set
me straight with the world once more, and need not have altered our
relations with each other one iota."

"You would have been false to your wife?" murmurs she, shrinking back
from him. "Oh, no! that would have been impossible!"

He laughs ironically.

"I tell you candidly," he says, with reckless emphasis, "I should have
been false to one or other of you, and it certainly would not have
been to you."

"You malign yourself," she says, looking at him with steadfast love.

"Do I? What a fool you are!" he says, roughly. "Well, by your own mad
folly you have separated us irretrievably. Blame yourself for this,
not me. My affairs are so hopelessly entangled that I must quit the
country without delay. Your own mad act has rolled an ocean between
us."

He turns, and goes towards the door. Wild with grief and despair, she
follows him, and lays a detaining hand upon his arm.

"Not like this, Horace!" she whispers, desperately. "Do not leave me
like this. Have pity. You shall not go like this! Be merciful: you are
my all!"

"Stand out of my way," he says, between his teeth: and then, as she
still clings to him in her agony, he ra