moment of his
painful life, and will shorten it."

She stopping, he said again: "Speak freely to me. Trust me."

"We have had five children before this darling, and they all lie in their
little graves. He believes that they have withered away under a curse,
and that it will blight this child like the rest."

"Under what curse?"

"Both I and he have it on our conscience that we tried you very heavily,
and I do not know but that, if I were as ill as he, I might suffer in my
mind as he does. This is the constant burden:--'I believe, Beatrice, I
was the only friend that Mr. Jackson ever cared to make, though I was so
much his junior. The more influence he acquired in the business, the
higher he advanced me, and I was alone in his private confidence. I came
between him and you, and I took you from him. We were both secret, and
the blow fell when he was wholly unprepared. The anguish it caused a man
so compressed, must have been terrible; the wrath it awakened,
inappeasable. So, a curse came to be invoked on our poor pretty little
flowers, and they fall.'"

"And you, Beatrice," he asked, when she had ceased to speak, and there
had been a silence afterwards: "how say you?"

"Until within these few weeks I was afraid of you, and I believed that
you would never, never, forgive."

"Until within these few weeks," he repeated. "Have you changed your
opinion of me within these few weeks?"

"Yes."

"For what reason?"

"I was getting some pieces of music in a shop in this town, when, to my
terror, you came in. As I veiled my face and stood in the dark end of
the shop, I heard you explain that you wanted a musical instrument for a
bedridden girl. Your voice and manner were so softened, you showed such
interest in its selection, you took it away yourself with so much
tenderness of care and pleasure, that I knew you were a man with a most
gentle heart. O Mr. Jackson, Mr. Jackson, if you could have felt the
refreshing rain of tears that followed for me!"

Was Phoebe playing at that moment, on her distant couch? He seemed to
hear her.

"I inquired in the shop where you lived, but could get no information.
As I had heard you say that you were going back by the next train (but
you did not say where), I resolved to visit the station at about that
time of day, as often as I could, between my lessons, on the chance of
seeing you again. I have been there very often, but saw you no more
until to-day. You were medita