the fair face was radiant with joy when he, Edmund,
ventured to kiss her; could hardly believe that it was of her own wish
and will that she leant against him now!

"I ought not to have said it was the stuffy room, ought I?"

It was the sweetest, youngest laugh she had ever given. Then she looked
up at the ceiling where the sun flickered a little.

"Edmund, it is better than if I had known under the mulberry tree. Tell
me you forgive me all I have done wrong. I could not," she gasped a
little, "have loved you then as I do now, because I had known no sorrow
then."

And Edmund told her that she was forgiven. But one sin she confessed
gave him, I fear, unmixed delight; she was so dreadfully afraid that she
had lately been a little jealous!

Strange--very strange and unfathomable--is the heart of man. It did not
even occur to him as the wildest scruple to be at all afraid that he had
been lately a little, ever so little, less occupied with the thought of
her. No shadow of a cloud rested on the great output of a strong man's
deep affection.

CHAPTER XXXIX

"WITHOUT CONDITION OR COMPROMISE"

It was on the same evening that Mark succeeded in seeing Molly. He had
failed the day before, but at the second attempt he succeeded.

It was the first time he had entered Westmoreland House, and he had
never, even in the autumn weeks when Miss Dexter had been most cordial
to him, tried to see her except by her own invitation. Altogether the
position now was as embarrassing as it is possible to conceive. He had
been her confidant as to a crime for which the law sees no kind of
palliative, no possible grounds for mercy. As he greeted her it wanted
little imaginative power to feel the dramatic elements in the picture.
Molly was standing in the middle of the great drawing-room dressed in
something very white and very beautiful. At any other moment he must
have been impressed by the subdued splendour of the room, and the grace
and youth of the dominating figure in the midst. Mark was too absorbed
to-day in the spiritual drama which he must now force to its conclusion
to realise that he had also come to threaten the destruction of Molly's
material world and all the glory thereof. He had, too, so far forgotten
himself, that the mischief Molly had wrought against him had faded into
the background of his consciousness. His absorbing anxiety lay in the
extreme difficulty of his task. It would need an angel from Heaven,
gifted to