trange language? You have
no right to address me thus; it is an insult to me--a wicked wrong
against your wife--"

"My wife!" the man burst forth, mockingly, and with a strangely bitter
laugh.

A frown contracted his brow, and his lips were compressed into a
vindictive line, as he again bent toward the fair girl.

"I do not love her," he said, hoarsely; "she has killed all my
affection for her by her infernally variable moods, her jealousy, her
vanity, and her inordinate passion for worldly pleasure, to the
exclusion of all home responsibilities. Moreover--"

"I must not listen to you! Oh! let me go!" cried Edith, in a voice of
distress.

Before Edith was aware of his intention, he bent his lips close to her
face, and whispered something, in swift sentences, that made her
shrink from him with a sudden cry of mingled pain and dismay, and
cover her ears with her pretty hands.

"I do not believe it!" she panted; "oh! I cannot believe it. I am sure
you do not know what you are saying, Mr. Goddard."

Her words appeared to arouse him to a sense of the fact that he was
compromising himself most miserably in her estimation.

"No, I don't suppose you can," he muttered, a half-dazed expression on
his face; "and I've no business to be telling you any such things.
But, all the same, I am very fond of you, pretty one, and I do not
believe this is any place for you. You are too fair and sweet to
serve a woman with such a disposition as madam possesses, and I wish
you would leave her when we go back to the city. I know you are poor,
and have no friends upon whom you can depend; but I would settle a
comfortable annuity upon you, so that you could be independent, and
make a pretty little home for your--"

"How dare you talk to me like this? Do you think I have no pride--no
self-respect?" Edith demanded, as she haughtily threw back her proud
head and confronted the man with blazing eyes.

Her act and the flash of the diamond attracted his attention to the
little chain and shamrock upon her breast.

The sight seemed to paralyze him for a moment, for he stood like one
turned to marble.

"Where did you get it?" he at last demanded, in a scarcely, audible
voice, as he pointed a trembling finger at the jewel. "Tell me!--tell
me! how came you by it?"

Edith regarded him with astonishment.

Involuntarily she put up her hand and covered the ornament from his
gaze.

"It was given to me," she briefly replied.

"Who gave it t