remove his eyes
from Bertha. She held him as by a powerful spell. He saw that her face
was lighted with an altogether new beauty; he noticed the deep glow
upon her cheek, the brilliancy of her eye, the slight quiver of her
lip. But he saw all this as one sees things in a half-trance, without
attempting to account for them; the door between his soul and his
senses was closed.

"I know that I have been bold in speaking to you in this way," she said
at last, seating herself in a chair at the window. "But it was yourself
who asked me. And I have felt all the time that I should have to tell
you this before we parted."

"And," answered he, making a strong effort to appear calm, "if I follow
your advice, will you allow me to see you once more before you go?"

"I shall remain here another week, and shall, during that time, always
be ready to receive you."

"Thank you. Good-by."

"Good-by."

Ralph carefully avoided all the fashionable thoroughfares; he felt
degraded before himself, and he had an idea that every man could read
his humiliation in his countenance. Now he walked on quickly, striking
the sidewalk with his heels; now, again, he fell into an uneasy,
reckless saunter, according as the changing moods inspired defiance of
his sentence, or a qualified surrender. And, as he walked on, the
bitterness grew within him, and he piteously reviled himself for having
allowed himself to be made a fool of by "that little country goose,"
when he was well aware that there were hundreds of women of the best
families of the land who would feel honored at receiving his
attentions. But this sort of reasoning he knew to be both weak and
contemptible, and his better self soon rose in loud rebellion.

"After all," he muttered, "in the main thing she was right. I am a
miserable good-for-nothing, a hothouse plant, a poor stick, and if I
were a woman myself, I don't think I should waste my affections on a
man of that calibre."

Then he unconsciously fell to analyzing Bertha's character, wondering
vaguely that a person who moved so timidly in social life, appearing so
diffident, from an ever-present fear of blundering against the
established forms of etiquette, could judge so quickly, and with such a
merciless certainty, whenever a moral question, a question of right and
wrong, was at issue. And, pursuing the same train of thought, he
contrasted her with himself, who moved in the highest spheres of
society as in his native element, hee