en as he spoke--"you mean--that you must make what the
world calls a good marriage?"

She bowed her head.

"At last you have grasped my meaning," she said coldly; "you have
hitherto been exceedingly slow to do so."

He looked at her silently for a moment or two, almost with abhorrence.
Her fair and delicate beauty affected him with a sort of loathing; he
could not believe that this woman with the cold lips and malignant eyes
had been born of his mother, had played with him in childhood, had
kissed him with loving kisses, and spoken to him in sisterly caressing
fashion. It took him some minutes to conquer the terrible hatred which
grew up within him towards her, as he remembered all that she had been
and all that she had done; but, when at last he was able to speak, his
voice was calm and studiously gentle.

"Florence," he said, "I will not forget that you are my sister. You bear
my name, you come of my race, and, whatever you do and whatever you are,
I cannot desert you. I promised our mother on her death-bed that I would
care for you as long as you needed care; and, if ever you needed it in
your life, you need it now! I have not done my duty to you during the
past few weeks. I have left you to yourself, and thought I could never
forgive you for what you had done. But now I see that I was wrong. If it
would be of any service to you, I would make a home for you at once--I
would place all my means at your disposal. Come back with me to London,
and let us make a home for ourselves together. We are both weary, both
have suffered; could we not try to console and strengthen each other?"

The wistfulness of his tone, of his looks, would have softened any heart
that was not hard as stone. But Florence Lepel's pale face was utterly
unmoved.

"You offer me a brilliant lot," she said--"to live in a garret, I
suppose, and darn your stockings, while you earn a paltry pittance as a
literary man, eked out by aunt Leo's charity! You know very well that
sooner than do that I put up for two years with Marion Vane's patronage
and the drudgery of the schoolroom! And now, when the woman who
alternately scolded and cajoled me, the woman who once took it upon her
to lecture me for my behavior to her husband, the woman whom I hated as
I should hate a poisonous snake--when that woman is slowly dying and
leaving the field to me, am I to throw up the game, give up my chances,
and go to vegetate with you in London? You know me very little if