hands. Marguerite looked at
him tentatively once or twice; she could see his handsome profile, and
one lazy eye, with its straight fine brow and drooping heavy lid.

The face in the moonlight looked singularly earnest, and recalled to
Marguerite's aching heart those happy days of courtship, before he had
become the lazy nincompoop, the effete fop, whose life seemed spent in
card and supper rooms.

But now, in the moonlight, she could not catch the expression of the
lazy blue eyes; she could only see the outline of the firm chin, the
corner of the strong mouth, the well-cut massive shape of the forehead;
truly, nature had meant well by Sir Percy; his faults must all be laid
at the door of that poor, half-crazy mother, and of the distracted
heart-broken father, neither of whom had cared for the young life
which was sprouting up between them, and which, perhaps, their very
carelessness was already beginning to wreck.

Marguerite suddenly felt intense sympathy for her husband. The moral
crisis she had just gone through made her feel indulgent towards the
faults, the delinquencies, of others.

How thoroughly a human being can be buffeted and overmastered by Fate,
had been borne in upon her with appalling force. Had anyone told her a
week ago that she would stoop to spy upon her friends, that she would
betray a brave and unsuspecting man into the hands of a relentless
enemy, she would have laughed the idea to scorn.

Yet she had done these things; anon, perhaps the death of that brave man
would be at her door, just as two years ago the Marquis de St. Cyr had
perished through a thoughtless words of hers; but in that case she was
morally innocent--she had meant no serious harm--fate merely had stepped
in. But this time she had done a thing that obviously was base, had done
it deliberately, for a motive which, perhaps, high moralists would not
even appreciate.

As she felt her husband's strong arm beside her, she also felt how much
more he would dislike and despise her, if he knew of this night's work.
Thus human beings judge of one another, with but little reason, and
no charity. She despised her husband for his inanities and vulgar,
unintellectual occupations; and he, she felt, would despise her still
worse, because she had not been strong enough to do right for right's
sake, and to sacrifice her brother to the dictates of her conscience.

Buried in her thoughts, Marguerite had found this hour in the
breezy summer nig