; but I began it, so I
suppose I must endure to see you groaning for another woman. You say,"
she went on, with a sudden flash of passion, "that you should like to
see her dead. I say that I should like to kill her, for she has struck
me a double blow--she has injured you whom I love, and she has
beggared me of your affection. Oh! Arthur," she continued, changing
her voice and throwing a caressing arm about his neck, "have you no
heart left to give _me?_ is there no lingering spark that _I_ can
cherish and blow to flame? I will never treat you so, dear. Learn to
love me, and I will marry you and make you happy, make you forget this
faithless woman with the angel face. I will----" here her voice broke
down in sobs, and in the starlight the great tears glistened upon her
coral-tinted face like dew-drops on a pomegranate's blushing rind.

"There, there, dear, I will try to forget; don't cry," and he touched
her on the forehead with his lips.

She stopped, and then said, with just the faintest tinge of bitterness
in her voice: "If it had been Angela who cried, you would not be so
cold, you would have kissed away her tears."

Who can say what hidden chord of feeling those words touched, or what
memories they awoke? but their effect upon Arthur was striking. He
sprang up upon the deck, his eyes blazing, and his face white with
anger.

"How often," he said, "must I forbid you to mention the name of that
woman to me? Do you take a pleasure in torturing me? Curse her, may
she eat out her empty heart in solitude, and find no living thing to
comfort her! May she suffer as she makes me suffer, till her life
becomes a hell----"

"Be quiet, Arthur, it is shameful to say such things."

He stopped, and after the sharp ring of his voice, that echoed like
the cry wrung from a person in intense pain, the loneliness and quiet
of the night were very deep. And then an answer came to his mad,
unmanly imprecations. For suddenly the air round them was filled with
the sound of his own name uttered in such wild, despairing accents as,
once heard, were not likely to be forgotten, accents which seemed to
be around them and over them, and heard in their own brains, and yet
to come travelling from immeasurable distances across the waste of
waters.

"_Arthur! Arthur!_"

The sound that had sprung from nothing died away into nothingness
again, and the moonlight glanced, and the waters heaved, and gave no
sign of the place of its birth. It had