nother man? She went over the scenes which they had enacted together,
she recalled his words and his letters, she thought of his sorrows and
trials, and remembered how he had appealed to her for sympathy. There
was good reason, she thought, why he had not written to her, for he was
barred by something more than worldly conventionality. When she,
strong-minded as she thought herself, had shrunk from the display of his
love because he still had duties to his lawful wife, she had imposed
upon him her demand for conventional and punctilious respect, and had
rather despised herself, she now remembered, for doing it. He had obeyed
her, he had observed her slightest wishes--it was for her, not for him,
to break through the silence. How had she been able to remain so long in
ignorance of his condition, to live contentedly so many miles away from
him?

As she thought of all these things in the light of her new experience,
her heart was touched again by the old sympathy, and throbbed once more
with the music which it had not known since her illness began. It was a
harp which had been laid aside and forgotten, till the owner, coming by
chance into the disused room, strung it anew, and bade it discourse the
symphonies of the olden time.

Not until Lettice had reached this point in her retrospect did she
perceive how near she had gone to the dividing line which separates
honor from faithlessness and truth from falsehood. She had said, "There
is no one to whom my love is pledged." Was that true? Which is stronger
or more sacred--the pledge of words or the pledge of feeling? She had
tried to drown the feeling, but it would not die. It was there, it had
never been absent; and she had profaned it by listening to the
temptations of Brooke Dalton, and by telling him that her heart was
free.

"It was a lie!"

She sank on the sofa as she made the confession to herself. Alan's
letters were in her hand; she clasped them to her breast, and murmured,

"It was a lie--for I love you!"

If the poor wretch in his prison cell, who, worn out at last by daily
self-consuming doubts, lay tossing with fever on a restless bed, could
have heard her words and seen her action, he might have been called back
to life from the borderland of the grave.

CHAPTER XXX.

AWAKENED.

"What is it, darling?" Mrs. Hartley said to her friend when they met the
next morning at the late breakfast which, out of deference to foreign
customs, they had adopte