n earnest conversation with the woman who had
been her guest two nights previous.

As noiselessly as a cat creeps after her prey, Anna Goddard stole
across that spacious apartment and concealed herself among the
voluminous folds of the draperies, where she found that she could
easily hear all that was said.

"You are very hard, Isabel," she heard Gerald Goddard remark, in a
reproachful voice.

"I grant you that," responded the liquid tones of his companion, "as
far as you and--that woman are concerned, I have no more feeling than
a stone."

At those words, "that woman," spoken in accents of supreme contempt,
the eyes of Anna Goddard began to blaze with a baneful gleam.

"And you will never forgive me for the wrong I did you so long ago?"
pleaded the man, with a sigh.

"What do you mean by that word 'forgive?'" coldly inquired Mrs.
Stewart.

"Pardon, remission--as Shakespeare has it, 'forgive and quite forget
old faults,'" returned Gerald Goddard, in a voice tremulous with
repressed emotion.

"Forget!" repeated the beautiful woman, in a wondering tone.

"Ah, if you could," eagerly cried her visitor; then, as if he could
control himself no longer, he went on, with passionate vehemence: "Oh,
Isabel! when you burst upon me, so like a radiant star, the other
night, and I realized that you were still in the flesh, instead of
lying in that lonely grave in far-off-Italy--when I saw you so grandly
beautiful--saw how wonderfully you had developed in every way, all the
old love came back to me, and I realized my foolish mistake of that
by-gone time as I had never realized it before."

Ah! if the man could have seen the white, set face concealed among the
draperies so near him--if he could have caught the deadly gleam that
shone with tiger-like fury in Anna Goddard's dusky eyes--he never
would have dared to face her again after giving utterance to those
maddening words.

"It strikes me, Mr. Goddard, that it is rather late--after twenty
years--to make such an acknowledgment to me," Isabel Stewart retorted,
with quiet irony.

"I know it--I feel it now," he responded, in accents of despair. "I
know that I forfeited both your love and respect when I began to yield
to the charms and flatteries of Anna Correlli. She was handsome, as
you know; she began to be fond of me from the moment of our
introduction; and when, in an unguarded moment, I revealed the--the
fact that you were not my wife, she resolved that she would sup