tricia remained a Catholic still.
She was depressed, suspicious, afraid of the future. Recriminations
and quarrels were constant between us. Finally, I went to America
with no farewell to my wife, to acquaint my father with my foolish
act, and to ask him to make some suitable provision for us.
Immediately following my departure, I discovered, my wife
re-entered the Catholic Church. Soon afterward I heard that her
father had extended his forgiveness, and that she had been welcomed
back by her kinfolk in Ireland. Hearing nothing from her whatever,
with the procrastination which was ever one of my great faults, I
put off doing anything about the annulment of the marriage until
the father of Quantrelle le Rouge wrote me that he had heard of her
death as well as that of the child. But before my marriage to
Mademoiselle D'Hauteville, I took the precaution to obtain a
divorce quietly in Illinois. Even if Patricia were living and
should marry again, I knew she needed no protection to make the
marriage a valid one, as her Church had never recognized that she
was married to me, the ceremony having been performed by a
Protestant."

Frank laid aside the papers, and, with his head thrown back and his eyes
closed, sat in the gathering darkness thinking, with neither continuity
nor result, of that strange life--current which, the family history
claimed, connected him backward to the song-making minstrels of the time
of Charlemagne; to the gallant lovers in the time of the Stuarts; to the
self-indulgent and magnetic Ravenels of North Carolina.

What had they done? Dermott's question came back to him again and again,
and through the depression into which this thinking was leading him he
heard Katrine singing softly on the piazza underneath his window.

Like a child he rose and went to her. She was standing by one of the
great white columns looking into the shadowy pine-trees as he came. He
did not touch her. He had such fear of breaking utterly before her that
he said, with forced quietude of voice:

"I've changed my mind about marrying you, Katrine." In spite of his
effort to be calm, his voice broke into something like a sob as he spoke
her name.

"Yes," she said, realizing what the import of the papers must have been.

After he had told Katrine the important fact in his father's statement,
there came to him with a sudden suspicion of the t