ogether; she wore a ring of mine, and she had a mark on her shoulder
the same as one on mine; her initials were the same. Luke had never
seen her. He believed that I lay dead there, and he buried her for me. I
thought at the time that it would be best I should be dead to him and to
the world. And so I did not speak. It was all the same to my brother. He
got what was left of my fortune, and I got what was left of hers. For I
was dead, you see--dead, dead, dead!"

She paused again. Neither spoke for a moment. Shorland was thinking what
all this meant to Clare Hazard and Luke Freeman.

"Where is he? What is he doing?" she said at length. "Tell me. I was--I
am--his wife."

"Yes, you were--you are--his wife. But better if you had been that woman
in the Morgue," he said without pity. What were this creature's feelings
to him? There was his friend and the true-souled Clare.

"I know, I know," she replied. "Go on!"

"He is well. The man that was born when his wife lay before him in the
Morgue has found another woman, a good woman who loves him and--"

"And is married to her?" interrupted Gabrielle, her face taking on again
a shining whiteness. But, as though suddenly remembering something,
she laughed that strange laugh which might have come from a soul
irretrievably lost. "And is married to her?"

Blake Shorland thought of the lust of cruelty, of the wounds, and the
acids of torture. "Not yet," he said; "but the marriage is set for the
twenty-six of this month."

"How I could spoil all that!"

"Yes, you could spoil all that. But you have spoiled enough already.
Don't you think that if Luke Freeman does marry, you had better be dead
as you have been this last five years? To have spoiled one life ought to
be enough to satisfy even a woman like you."

Her eyes looked through Blake Shorland's eyes and beyond them to
something else; and then they closed. When they opened again, she said:
"It is strange that I never thought of his marrying again. And now I
want to kill her--just for the moment. That is the selfish devil in me.
Well, what is to be done, monsieur? There is the Morgue left. But then
there is no Morgue here. Ah, well, we can make one, perhaps--we can make
a Morgue, monsieur."

"Can't you see that he ought to be left the rest of his life in peace?"

"Yes, I can see that."

"Well, then!"

"Well--and then, monsieur? Ah, you did not wish him to marry me. He told
me so. 'A fickle foreigner,' you said. And yo