nd; then she
solemnly put it on her finger, and turning, faced them all.

"Do not blame me too much for this final blow I gave him. He had already
seen the truth in that mirror over there. His face--look at it and then
at this picture of her taken after death, and see the resemblance! It is
showing plainer every minute. It was the something which had worried and
eluded him. Nothing could have kept back the truth from him after that
one glimpse he caught of himself and her in the mirror. I loved him. Mine
is the grief; you will let me stay here with him to-night. To-morrow I
will answer all questions."

XXXIV

THE BUD--THEN THE DEADLY FLOWER

You who have read thus far will care little for the legalities which
followed the events just related, but you may wish to know to a fuller
extent some of the facts in Ermentrude Taylor's life which led to this
tragic end of all her hopes.

Her story is twofold, the portion connecting her with Carleton Roberts
being entirely dissociated from that which made her the debtor of
Antoinette Duclos. Let me tell the latter first, as it preceded the
other, and tell it in episodes.

* * * * *

Two girls stood at one end of a long walk of immemorial yews. At
the other could be seen the advancing figure of a man, young, alert,
English-clad but unmistakably foreign. They were school girls and bosom
friends; he their instructor in French; the walk one attached to a
well-known seminary. When they had entered this walk, it had been empty.
Now it held for one of them--and possibly for the other, too--a world of
joy and promise;--the world of seventeen. Innocent and unthinking,
neither of them had known her own heart, much less that of her fellow.
But when in face of that approach, eye met eye with an askance look of
eager question, revelation came, crimsoning the cheeks of both, and
marking an epoch in either life.

Noble of heart and tender each toward the other, they were yet human. Arm
fell from arm, and with an equally spontaneous movement, they turned to
search each the other's countenance, not for betrayal,--for that had
already been made--but for those physical charms or marks of mental
superiority which might attract the eye or win the heart of a man of the
ideality of this one.

Alas! these gifts, for gifts they are, were much too unequally
distributed between these two to render the balance at all even.

Ermentrude was handsome; Antoinet