ve a notion that if you let him see
that there is no one in the house wishes him worse than you, or would
see him starve, the stupid fool, with a lighter heart--I'm thinking it
will be for bringing him down, if anything will!"

She did not answer. And outwardly she was not much moved. But inwardly,
the horror of herself and her part in the matter, which she had felt as
she lay upstairs in the darkness, thinking of the starving man, whelmed
up and choked her. They were using her for this! They were using her
because the man--loved her! Because hard words, cruel treatment,
brutality from her would be ten times more hard, more cruel, more
brutal than from others! Because such treatment at her hands would be
more likely to break his spirit and crush his heart! To what viler use,
to what lower end could a woman be used, or human feeling be
prostituted?

Nor was this all. On the tide of this loathing of herself rose another,
a newer and a stranger feeling. The man loved her. She did not doubt
the statement. Its truth came home to her at once, although, occupied
with other views of him, she had never suspected the fact. And because
it placed him in a different light, because it placed him in a light in
which she had never viewed him before, because it recalled a hundred
things, acts, words on his part which she had barely noted at the time,
but which now took on another aspect, it showed him, too, as one whom
she had never seen. Had he been free at this moment, prosperous,
triumphant, the knowledge that he loved her, that he, her enemy, loved
her, might have revolted her--she might have hated him the more for it.
But now that he lay a prisoner, famished, starving, the fact that he
loved her touched her heart, transfixed her with an almost poignant
feeling, choked her with a rising flood of pity and self-reproach.

"So there you have it, Flavvy!" James cried complacently. "And sure,
you'll not be making a fool of yourself at this time of day!"

She stood as one stunned; looking at him with strange eyes, thinking,
not answering. Asgill, and Asgill only, saw a burning blush dye for an
instant the whiteness of her face. He, and he only, discovered, with
the subtle insight of one who loved, a part of what she was thinking.
He wished James McMurrough in the depth of hell. But it was too late,
or he feared so.

Great was his relief, therefore, when she spoke. "Then you'll not--be
going now?" she said.

"Now?" James retorted co