ever fully known before how intensely they loved each other.

My resolution was taken. Cost what it might, come what might, I would
speak fully and frankly to my sister the next day. I would not longer
stand by and see this thing go on. At that moment I hated both John Gray
and Emma Long. No possible pain to Ellen seemed to me to weigh for a
moment against my impulse to part them.

I could not talk. I availed myself of the freedom warranted by the
intimacy between the families, and continued to seem absorbed in my book.
But I lost no word, no look, which passed between the two who sat opposite
me. I never saw Emma Long look so nearly beautiful as she did that night.
She wore a black velvet dress, with fine white lace ruffles at the throat
and wrists. Her hair was fair, and her complexion of that soft pale tint,
with a slight undertone of brown in it, which is at once fair and warm,
and which can kindle in moments of excitement into a brilliance far
outshining any brunette skin. She talked rapidly with much gesture. She
was giving John an account of the stupidity of the people with whom she
had been dining. Her imitative faculty amounted almost to genius. No
smallest peculiarity of manner or speech escaped her, and she could become
a dozen different persons in a minute. John laughed as he listened, but
not so heartily as he was wont to laugh at her humorous sayings. He had
been too deeply stirred in the long interval of solitude before she
returned. His cheeks were flushed and his voice unsteady. She soon felt
the effect of his manner, and her gayety died away; before long they were
sitting in silence, each looking at the fire. I knew I ought to make the
proposition to go home, but I seemed under a spell; I was conscious of a
morbid desire to watch and wait. At length Mrs. Long rose, saying,--

"If it will not disturb Sally's reading, I will play for you a lovely
little thing I learned yesterday."

"Oh, no," said I. "But we must go as soon as I finish this chapter."

She passed into the music-room and looked back for John to follow her; but
he threw himself at full length on the sofa, and said,--

"No, I will listen here."

My quickened instinct saw that he dared not go; also that he had laid his
cheek in an abandonment of ecstasy on the arm of the sofa on which her
hand had been resting. Even in that moment I had a sharp pang of pity for
him, and the same old misgiving of question, whether my good and sweet and
al