then
turn and meet my gaze with a look I could not understand, I caught
myself asking whether I had done a deed destined to hang forever about
me like a pall; it was not till after his death that the despairing
image of the bright young creature to whom I had given my name, returned
with any startling distinctness to my mind, or that I allowed myself to
ask whether the heavy gloom which I now felt settling upon me was owing
to the sense of shame that overpowered me at the remembrance of the
past, or to the possible loss I had sustained in the departure of my
young unloved bride.

"The announcement at this time of the engagement between Evelyn Blake
and the Count De Mirac may have had something to do with this. Though I
had never in the most passionate hours of my love for her, lost sight of
that side of her nature which demanded as her right the luxury of great
wealth; and though in my tacit abandonment of her and secret marriage
with another I had certainly lost the right to complain of her actions
whatever they might be, this manifest surrendering of herself to the
power of wealth and show at the price of all that women are believed to
hold dear, was an undoubted blow to my pride and the confidence I
had till now unconsciously reposed in her inherent womanliness and
affection. That she had but made on a more conspicuous scale, the same
sacrifice as myself to the god of Wealth and Position, was in my eyes
at that time, no palliation of her conduct. I was a man none too good
or exalted at the best; she, a woman, should have been superior to the
temptations that overpowered me. That she was not, seemed to drag all
womanhood a little nearer the dust; fashionable womanhood I ought to
say, for somehow even at that early day her conduct did not seem to
affect the vivid image of Luttra standing upon my threshold, shorn of
her joy but burning with a devotion I did not comprehend, and saying,

"'I loved you. Ah, and I do yet, my husband, love you so that I leave
you. When the day comes--if the day comes--you need or feel you need
the sustainment of my presence or the devotion of my heart, no power on
earth save that of death itself, shall keep me from your side.'

"Yes, with the fading away of other faces and other forms, that face and
that form now began to usurp the chief place in my thoughts. Not to my
relief and pleasure. That could scarcely be, remembering all that had
occurred; rather to my increasing distress and pass