ashes every gentle feeling she
ever possessed.

It was of one of his terrible tempers she was thinking now. He had
displayed a fury she could never, would never forget. It was a memory
that tripped her even now at every turn, till it had become something
akin to an obsession.

Every detail of the scene was as clear cut in her mind as a hideous
cameo, every word he had uttered, the accusations, the insinuations he
had made. Even the room, with its simple furnishings, its neatness,
its air of care--her care--stood out sharply in her memory. She
remembered it all so well. She was in the midst of preparing Charles
Stanmore's supper, and Joan, only a couple of weeks old, was fast
asleep in an adjoining bedroom. He had chosen this time to call,
because he knew that she, Mercy, would be alone.

She remembered his handsome face clouded with sullen anger and
jealousy when she let him in at the door of the apartment. And then
his first words when he took up his position before the hard-coal
stove in the parlor--

"So you've pitched everything to the devil, and taken up your abode
with Charlie," he began, in tones of jealous fury. "And he--he is your
brother-in-law."

There was no mistaking his meaning. He intended that she should make
no mistake, for he added a laugh--a hateful laugh--to his words.

This was the man who had asked her to marry him almost numberless
times. This was the man whom she had refused time and again, making it
plain that, however hopelessly, her love was given to another. This
was the man who knew that she had come at her sister's death to care
for the little, new-born, motherless, baby girl, and help the man whom
she had always loved out of the hopeless dilemma in which he found
himself. This was the man who was the lifelong friend of Charles
Stanmore, whose mistress he was accusing her of having become.

She remembered the sudden anger which leapt to her brain. She
remembered, too, the thought which came in its midst, and formulated
her instant retort.

"Yes," she said coldly. "I have."

Then she saw the real man as she had now come to regard him. She
remembered the sudden blaze of his eyes, the ghastly pallor of his
face, the look of almost insane jealousy which he turned upon her. And
then came that never-to-be-forgotten insult, those words which had
seared themselves upon her woman's heart as though branded thereon
with red-hot irons.

"And you are the woman I have loved. Woman?" He laug