ome in his land beyond the sea. I was ignorant of marriage as
a baby. It was easy to get up a girlish fancy for the young man thus
presented to my childish imagination, and I consented willingly. I had a
lot of charming clothes ordered for my trousseau, and I was as delighted
as a child. In this way I was married--"

"Ah, you were really married!" interrupted her companion, the cloud on
her face beginning to clear away. Christine saw it with a tinge of
bitterness in her gentle heart.

"No," she said, almost coldly, "I was not really married. I thought so,
and for three years I struggled through pain and woe and horror to do my
duty to the man to whom I believed myself bound by the holy and
indissoluble tie of marriage. I was ignorant, but somehow I had imbibed
from every source ever opened to me a deep sense of the sacredness and
eternity of that bond. So I fought and struggled on, feeling that truth
to that obligation was my one anchor in a sea of trouble. I thought when
I came here I could tell you some of the things I felt and endured, but
I cannot. There would be no use. The bare fact is enough for a woman's
heart. When my child came I fixed my whole soul's devotion on him. He
was always delicate and feeble, but I loved him as, perhaps, a strong
and healthy child could not have been loved. His father never noticed
him at all, except to show that he thought him a burden. That was the
final touch of complete alienation. Love--or what I had once called by
that name--was gone long ago. We had become extremely poor--every cent
of the principal had been spent in the most reckless way--oh, I can't
tell you all that. Your son will tell you if you ask him. I think a sort
of mental lack was at the back of it. I must hurry; I can't bear to go
over it all now. I met your son on the steamer coming over, and he was
kind to me then, suspecting, perhaps, how things were tending. Long
after I met him again, accidentally, and he found out how wretched and
poor I was, with my baby ill, and in need almost of the necessaries of
life. He gave me sittings at his studio, then, and paid me for
them--larger sums, I suppose, than they were worth. At any rate, he and
a good doctor and an old servant helped me through my trouble when my
baby died and was buried. Then--oh, I am almost done with it now, thank
God!" she said, with a great sobbing breath--"it came to your son's
knowledge, professionally, that another woman claimed the man I suppose