t by her side.

"Approach!" she said, in a soft but mocking voice. "Be amiable! Let us
talk. I come for peace, not for war. Let us make terms with each other.
I am sick of this farce of hostility between husband and wife--let us
arrange our little disagreements. Come!"

Her familiar tone was odious to him. The sudden perversion of his
thoughts from Lettice to this creature, from his dream of purity and
elevation to this degrading reality, filled him with disgust. Nay,
something more than disgust entered his mind as he saw the smile on her
besotted face. A demon of revenge seized upon him, and all but gained
the mastery. For one instant he was perilously near to springing on her
where she sat, and strangling the life out of her. All passions and all
possibilities are in the soul of every one of us, at every moment; only
the motive power, the circumstance, the incitement, are needed to make
us cross the boundary of restraint. If Alan was not a murderer, it was
not because the thing was impossible to him, but because at the crisis
of temptation his heart had been penetrated by the influence of the
woman whom he revered, and filled with higher thoughts--even through the
channel of humiliation and self-contempt.

He answered her calmly.

"There is no arranging what has happened between us two--nor do you wish
it any more than I. Say what you want to say, and go."

"Good! I will say what I want to say--but I will not go. I mean to stay
with my husband; it is my right. Till death do us part--are not those
the pretty words of the farce we played together?"

"Who made it a farce--did I?"

"Listen, my friend. This is one thing I want to say. Assuredly it was
you, and no other, who made our marriage a miserable failure. You took
me from a life I loved, from friends who loved me, from a freedom which
I valued, and you made no effort to study my tastes and accommodate
yourself to my habits."

"God knows I made the effort. But what were those tastes and habits?
Think of them--think of them all! Could I have accommodated myself to
all--even to those you concealed from me?"

"Bah! you should have known whom you had married. You were so blind and
foolish, that I had a right to think you would never interfere with my
liberty. I was the child of liberty--and liberty is a sacred possession,
which it is an outrage to take away from any woman. You expected me to
change, to become all at once another being, cold and impassive like