carefully wrote upon and
finished each card, he as carefully laid it on his right hand, until a
little heap grew there.

Sybil, who gloried in all her husband's accomplishments, from the
greatest to the least, admired very much his skill in ornamental
chirography. She drew her chair closer to the table, and took up the
topmost card, and began to decipher, rather than to read, the name in
the beautiful old English characters, so tangled in a thicket of
rose-buds and forget-me-nots as to be scarcely legible. She looked
closely and more closely at the name on the card.

What was there in it to drive all the color from her cheeks?

She snatched up and scrutinized a second card, a third, a fourth; then,
springing to her feet, she seized the whole mass, hurled them into the
fire, and turned, and confronted her husband.

Her teeth were clenched upon her bloodless lips, her face seemed marble,
her eyes lambent flames.

He rose to his feet in surprise and dismay.

"SYBIL! what is all this? Why have you destroyed the cards?"

"Why?" she gasped, pressing both hands upon her heart, as if to keep
down its horrible throbbings. "Why? Because they are lies! _lies!_
LIES!"

"SYBIL! have you gone suddenly mad?" he cried, gazing at the "embodied
storm" before him with increasing astonishment and consternation.

"No! I have suddenly come to my senses!" she gasped between the catches
of her breath, for she could scarcely speak.

"You must calm yourself, and tell me what this means, my wife," said
Lyon Berners, exerting a great control over himself, and pushing aside
the last card he had written.

But she snatched up that card, glanced at it fiercely, tore it in two,
and threw the fragments far apart, exclaiming in bitter triumph:

"Not yet! oh! not yet! I am not dead yet! Nor have the halls and acres
of my fathers passed quite away from their daughter to the possession of
a traitor and an ingrate."

He gazed upon her now in amazement and alarm. _Had_ she gone suddenly
mad?

She stood there before him the incarnation of the fiercest and intensest
passion he had ever seen or imagined.

He went and took her in his arms, saying more gently than before:

"Sybil, what is it?"

She tried, harshly and cruelly, to break from him. But he held her in a
fast, loving embrace, murmuring still:

"Sybil, you must tell me what troubles you?"

"What troubles me!" she furiously exclaimed. "Let me go, man! Your touch
is a dishonor to