sent you forward in advance to the Wirt House, Baltimore, there to
await the arrival of our party, and join us in our summer travel? And
didn't you have a long, delightful tour with us through the most sublime
scenery in the most salubrious climates on earth? Didn't you return a
perfect Hebe in health and bloom?"

"I acknowledge all that. I acknowledge all my obligations to your
family; but at the same time I declare that I also did my part. I was as
a white slave to your parents. I was lady's maid to your mother, foot
boy to your father. I don't know, indeed, what the old people would have
done without me, for no hired servant could have served them as
faithfully as I did."

"Oh, yes; you were grateful and devoted to all the family except to me,
your best friend--to me, who gave you the use of a lovely home, and a
liberal income, and a faithful friendship; and then trusted in your
sense of justice for my reward."

"I would have given you all I possessed in the world--my own poor self
in marriage--and you led me on to believe that you wished to marry me,
but, finally, you would not have me. You went off and married another
woman."

"Bah! we are talking around in a circle, and getting back to where we
began. Let us come to the point."

"Very well; come to the point," said Rose, sulkily.

"Listen, then: It is not for your reckless elopement with your
step-father's pupil, when you were driven from home by cruelty; it is
not for your false marriage with Stillwater, when you yourself were
deceived; but because with all these antecedents against
you--antecedents which constituted you, however unjustly, a pariah, who
should have lived quietly and obscurely, but who, instead of doing so,
took advantage of kindness shown her, and betrayed the family who
sheltered her by luring into a disgraceful marriage its revered father,
and bringing to deep dishonor the gray head of Aaron Rockharrt, a man of
stern integrity and unblemished reputation--you should be denounced and
punished."

"Oh, Fabian, have mercy! have mercy! You would not now, after years of
friendship, you would not now ruin me?"

"Listen to me! You checkmated me in that matter of the cottage and the
income. Yes, simple as you seem, and sharp as I may appear, you
certainly managed to take all and give nothing. And when you found but
that you could not take my hand and my name, you waylaid me at the
railway station, when I was on my wedding tour, and you swore t