ot have forced her to come to me."

"Not!"

"My life was not worth saving."

"She has not gone back from you again?--the horrible girl!" (this
last aside).

"It is not that she has gone back. She has never changed. It is I
who have forfeited her."

"You!--You!--She has not cast you off?"

"You know how it was, and the resolution by which she had bound
herself, and how I was maddened."

"That! I thought it was all forgiven and forgotten!" cried
Rosamond.

"It is not a matter of forgiveness. She put it to me whether it was
possible to begin on a broken word."

"Worse and worse! Why, when you've spoken a foolish word, it is the
foolishest thing in the world to hold to it."

"If it were a foolish word!" said poor Frank. "I think I could have
atoned for that day, if she could have tried me; but when she left
me to judge, and those eyes of sweet, sorrowful--"

"Sweet! Sorrowful, indeed! About as sweet and sorrowful as the
butcher to the lamb. Left you to judge! A refinement of cruelty!
She had better have stayed away when I told her it was the only
chance to save your life."

"Would that she had!" sighed Frank. "But that was your doing,
Rosamond, and what she did in mere humanity can't be cast back again
to bind her against her conscience."

"Plague on her conscience!" was my Lady's imprecation. "I wonder if
it is all coquetry!"

"She deserves no blame," said Frank, understanding the manner,
though the words were under Rosamond's breath. "Her very troubles
in her own family have been the cause of her erecting a standard of
what alone she could trust. Once in better days she fancied I came
up to it, and when I know how far I have fallen short of it--"

"Nonsense. She had no business to make the condition without
warning you."

"She knows more of me than only that," muttered poor Frank. "I was
an ass in town last summer. It was the hope of seeing her that drew
me; but if I had kept out of that set, all this would never have
been."

"It was all for her sake." (A substratum of 'Ungrateful, ungenerous
girl.')

"For her sake, I thought--not her true sake." Then there was a
silence, broken by his exclaiming, "Rose, I must get away from
here!"

"You can't," she called back. "Here's your mother coming. She
would be perfectly miserable to find you gone."

"It is impossible I should stay here."

"Don't be so chicken-hearted, Frank. If she has a heart worth
speaking of, she'll come ro