tter; I have it yet; the one in which you told me
it was a mock marriage, as, by your own confession, it seems you meant
it should be."

"Oh, darling, you kill me, yet I deserve it all; but, Adah, I have
suffered enough to atone for the dreadful past; and I tried so hard to
find you. Forgive me, Lily, forgive," and falling again on his knees,
the wretched man poured forth a torrent of entreaties for her
forgiveness, her love, without which he should die.

Holding fast her cold hands, he pleaded with all his eloquence, until,
maddened by her silence, he even taunted her with loving another, while
her own husband was living.

Then Adah started, and pushing him away, sprang to her feet, while the
hot blood stained her face and neck, and a resentful fire gleamed from
her brown eyes.

"It is not well for you to reproach me with faithlessness," she said,
"you, who have dealt so treacherously by me; you, who deliberately
planned my ruin, and would have effected it but for the deeper-laid
scheme of one you say is my father. No thanks to you that I am a lawful
wife. You did not make me so of your own free will. You did to me the
greatest wrong a man can do a woman, then cruelly deserted me, and now
you would chide me for respecting another more than I do you."

"Not respecting him, Adah, no, not for respecting him. You should do
that. He's worthier than I; but, oh, Adah, Lily, wife, mother of my boy,
do you love Irving Stanley?"

He was sobbing bitterly, and the words came between the sobs, while he
tried to clutch her dress. Staggering backward against the wooden beam,
Adah leaned there for support, while she replied:

"You would not understand if I should tell you the terrible struggle it
was for me to be thrown each day in the society of one as noble, as good
as Irving Stanley, and not come at last to feel for him as a poor
governess ought never to feel for the handsome, gifted brother of her
employer. Oh, George, I prayed against it so much, prayed to be kept
from the sin, if it were a sin, to have Irving Stanley mingled with
every thought. But the more I prayed, the more the temptation seemed
thrust upon me. The kinder, gentler, more attentive, grew his manners
toward me. He never treated me as a mere governess. It was more like an
equal at first, and then like a younger sister, so that few strangers
took me for a subordinate, so kind were both Mrs. Ellsworth and her
brother."

"And he," the doctor gasped, looking