not."

"I give you permission to lead any life you please," she said
vehemently.

"Thank you!" I thought, sarcastically; "but your permission has nothing
to do with it."

"It is useless to discuss the matter," I said aloud. "I cannot argue
the point with you; I have said there is no third alternative."

"I think you are most unkind," and Lucia let two lovely arms and hands
sink over the sides of the chair in gesture of weak despair.

I noticed, indifferently, that she was unnaturally pale.

"If you consent to our marriage, Lucia," I urged, pressing that
alluring waist, "I will promise this, if it will simplify matters--you
shall continue to live as if you were unmarried until you yourself put
things on another footing."

She glanced at me quickly, as I spoke, with an unexpressed surprise.

"Then what would you gain?" she said, coldly, and the unveiled cynicism
in the words went home.

I flushed.

"The certainty," I answered, briefly. "This indefinite state of things
is simply intolerable."

She was silent for a second; then she said violently, the scarlet
flowing over her face up to her eyes--

"No! It would be impossible to maintain such relations as those after
marriage, and you know it! That is quite out of the question!"

I merely shrugged my shoulders in silence.

"I am waiting for your answer, Lucia," I said, after a few moments.

"And if I cannot give you one?"

"Then I leave town to-morrow morning."

She gave a fleeting glance into my face, and then suddenly burst into a
passion of convulsive sobs and tears--sobs that seemed to tear her
breast asunder, and tears that started in a blinding torrent, drenching
her eyelids and eyelashes and pale cheeks.

"It is most unkind, it is horrible, it is cruel of you to press me in
this way!" she sobbed, trying with both hot, trembling hands to push my
arm away and to free herself from my clasp.

The sight of her tears hurt me, the pain stamped on the soft face, and
the tumultuous rising and falling of her breast in those agonised sobs,
reproached me, but the hurt and the reproach were dull. If she thought
her tears would induce me to hesitate or to desist, she was wrong. They
were to me simply a favourable sign of her weakness, and urged me to
press my advantage. I felt instinctively that it would not do to fail
now; having gone so far, I must go farther, and be successful. Probably
I should be much sooner forgiven by Lucia herself. Nothing is less