d his ground.

"But you must have plotted this thing long ago, for your play was
written, and your characters chosen before we left the city," he
remarked.

"Well?"

"But you said you had two reasons; what was the other?"

"Emil's love for the girl. He became infatuated with her from the
moment of his coming to us, as you must have noticed."

"Yes."

"Well, he tried to win her--he even asked her to marry him, but she
refused him. Think of it--that little nobody rejecting a man like
Emil, with his wealth and position!"

"Well, if she did not love him, she had a right to refuse, him."

"Oh, of course," sneered madam, irritably. "But you know what he is
when he once gets his heart set upon anything, and her obstinacy only
made him the more determined to carry his point. He appealed to me to
help him; and, as I have never refused him anything he wanted, if I
could possibly give it to him--"

"But this was such a wicked--such a heartless, cowardly thing to do!"
interposed Mr. Goddard, with a gesture of horror.

"I know it," madam retorted, with a defiant toss of her head; "but you
may thank yourself for it, after all; for, almost at the last moment,
I repented--I was on the point of giving the whole thing up and
letting the play go on without any change of characters, when your
faithlessness turned me into a demon, and doomed the girl."

"I believe you are a 'demon'--your jealousy has been the bane of your
whole life and mine; and now you have ruined the future of as
beautiful and pure a girl as ever walked the earth," said Gerald
Goddard, with a threatening brow, and in a tone so deadly cold that
the woman beside him shivered.

"Pshaw! don't be so tragic," she said, after a moment, and assuming an
air of lightness, "the affair will end all right--when Edith comes
fully to herself and realizes the situation, I am sure she will make
up her mind to submit gracefully to the inevitable."

"She shall not--I will help her to break the tie that binds her to
him."

"Will you?" mockingly questioned his wife. "How pray?"

"By claiming that she was tricked into the marriage."

"How will you prove that, Gerald?" was the smiling query.

The man was dumb. He knew he could not prove it.

"Did she not go willingly enough to the altar?" pursued madam. "Did
she not repeat the responses freely and unhesitatingly? Was she not
married by a regularly ordained minister? and was she not introduced
afterward to hundreds of pe