ich the dullest-witted present knew she
was expected to keep to herself.

Still lost to her surroundings in her reverie, the Bride heard again
the outburst of foolish laughter with which the wife had once publicly
declared her husband could keep nothing from her because of his habit
of talking in his sleep. What she wished to know that in the daytime he
would not tell her, she got from him at night by asking questions he
never failed to answer while he slept.

She had hated her; and at last the poor creature, whose smiling face
lay there beneath her fascinated gaze, had known it, and with the
inferior force of her inferior nature had hated back. She had
learnt--who knew how?--of the love between the woman who had been her
friend and her own husband. The eyes had smiled no longer then.

The Bride lay back in her chair, motionless, while before her mind's
eye rose the altered face of the woman who, deceived for long, was
deceived no more--who knew! With her there had been no self-respecting
reticence, no decency of secret tears. She had heaped insult upon the
woman who had wronged her, she had led her husband a life of hell.

That time had been, mercifully, of short duration. A little illness of
which no one took account, had ended all for the unhappy wife, had been
the beginning of a joy beyond words for the other two. She had kept her
bed for two days, suffering from a nervous attack, accompanied by
excruciating neuralgia, and had died quite suddenly from the bursting
of a vessel on the brain.

It had been, of course, in this room she had died. Upon the bed, there.
And her husband, sleeping beside her, had not known that she was dead.
Slowly the Bride, as if fearing what she might see, looked over her
shoulder. The room, with a bright fire, and lit by electric light, was
as cheerful as day. But as her eyes, slowly travelling back again, met
their own reflection in the glass, she saw in them a haunted look which
frightened her. She flew to her feet; snatching the portrait from the
table, she hurriedly crossed the room and flung it to the flames.

"He is right. Why not?" she said. "To burn a picture is
nothing--nothing! And it has given me horrible thoughts."

It was difficult to banish them.

When the newly-married pair were alone in the drawing-room after
dinner, and she was seated at the piano, she asked him, through the
chords she was softly touching, if there was not another room in the
house they could take