rms
around my neck.

"I love you, Carus! I love you!" she stammered. "I care for that,
only--only for that! If it be for a week, if it be for a day, an hour,
an instant, it is what I was made for, it is what I was fashioned
for--to love you, Carus! There is nothing else--nothing else in all the
world! Love me, take me, do with me what you will! I yield all you ask,
all you beg, all you desire--all save wedlock!"

She swayed in my arms. A deadly pallor whitened her; then her knees
trembled and she gave way, sinking to the floor, her head buried in the
flowering curtains of the bed; and I to drop on my knees beside her,
seeking to lift her face while the sobs shook her slender body, and she
wept convulsively, head prostrate in her arms.

"I--I am wicked!" she wailed. "Oh, I have done that which has damned me
forever, Carus!--forever and ever. I can not wed you--I love you
so!--yet I can not wed you! What wild folly drove me to go with you?
What devil has dragged me here to tempt you--whom I love so truly? Oh,
God pity us both--God pity us!"

"Elsin," I said hoarsely, "you are mad to say it! Is there anything on
earth to bar us from wedlock?"

"Yes, Carus, yes!" she cried. "It is--it is too late!"

"Too late!" I repeated, stunned.

"Aye--for I am a wedded wife! Now you know! Oh, this is the end of
all!"

A while she lay there sobbing her heart out, I upright on my knees
beside her, staring at blank space, which reeled and reeled, so that
the room swam all awry, and I strove to steady it with fixed gaze, lest
the whole world come crashing upon us.

At last she spoke, lifting her tear-marred face from the floor to the
bed, forehead resting heavily in her hands:

"I ask your pardon--for the sin I have committed. Hear me out--that is
my penance; spurn me--that is my punishment!"

She pressed her wet eyes, shuddering. "Are you listening, Carus? The
night before I sailed from Canada--_he_ sought me----"

"Who?" My lips found the question, but no sound came.

"Walter Butler! O God! that I have done this thing!"

In the dreadful silence I heard her choking back the cry that strangled
her. And after a while she found her voice again: "I was a child--a
vain, silly thing of moods and romance, ignorant of men, innocent of
the world, flattered by the mystery with which he cloaked his passion,
awed, fascinated by this first melancholy lover who had wrung from me
through pity, through vanity, through a vague fear of him