she began but paused with a sudden control of her emotion
that lifted her into an atmosphere almost holy in its significance. "Mr.
Blake," said she, "I am a woman and therefore weak to the voice of love
pleading in my ear. But in one thing I am strong, and that is in my
sense of what is due to the man I have sworn to honor. Eleven months ago
I left you because your pleasure and my own dignity demanded it; to-day
I put by all the joy and exaltation you offer, because your position as
a gentleman, and your happiness as a man equally requires it."

"My happiness as a man!" he broke in. "Ah, Luttra if you love me as I do
you--"

"I might perhaps yield," she allowed with a faint smile. "But I love
you as a girl brought up amid surroundings from which her whole being
recoiled, must love the one who first brought light into her darkness
and opened up to her longing feet the way to a life of culture, purity
and honor. I were the basest of women could I consent to repay such a
boundless favor--"

"But Luttra," he again broke in, "you married me knowing what your
father and brother were capable of committing."

"Yes, yes; I was blinded by passion, a girl's passion, Mr. Blake, born
of glamour and gratitude; not the self-forgetting devotion of a woman
who has tasted the bitterness of life and so learned its lesson of
sacrifice. I may not have thought, certainly I did not realize, what I
was doing. Besides, my father and brother were not convicted criminals
at that time, however weak they had proved themselves under temptation.
And then I believed I had left them behind me on the road of life; that
we were sundered, irrevocably cut loose from all possible connection.
But such ties are not to be snapped so easily. They found me, you see,
and they will find me again--"

"Never!" exclaimed her husband. "They are as dead to you as if the grave
had swallowed them. I have taken care of that."

"But the shame! you have not taken care of that. That exists and must,
and while it does I remain where I can meet it alone. I love you; God's
sun is not dearer to my eyes; but I will never cross your threshold as
your wife till the opprobrium can be cut loose from my skirts, and the
shadow uplifted from my brow. A queen with high thoughts in her eyes and
brave hopes in her heart were not too good to enter that door with you.
Shall a girl who has lived three weeks in an atmosphere of such crime
and despair, that these rooms have often seemed