he only obstacle you have to
fear. Am I right?"

"No; you are wrong."

"In what way, if you please?"

"In this way. I don't regard Mr. Morris as an obstacle. Emily is too
delicate and too kind to hurt his feelings--she is not in love with him.
There is no absorbing interest in her mind to divert her thoughts from
me. She is idle and happy; she thoroughly enjoys her visit to this
house, and I am associated with her enjoyment. There is my chance--!"

He suddenly stopped. Listening to him thus far, unnaturally calm and
cold, Francine now showed that she felt the lash of his contempt. A
hideous smile passed slowly over her white face. It threatened the
vengeance which knows no fear, no pity, no remorse--the vengeance of a
jealous woman. Hysterical anger, furious language, Mirabel was prepared
for. The smile frightened him.

"Well?" she said scornfully, "why don't you go on?"

A bolder man might still have maintained the audacious position which
he had assumed. Mirabel's faint heart shrank from it. He was eager
to shelter himself under the first excuse that he could find. His
ingenuity, paralyzed by his fears, was unable to invent anything new. He
feebly availed himself of the commonplace trick of evasion which he had
read of in novels, and seen in action on the stage.

"Is it possible," he asked, with an overacted assumption of surprise,
"that you think I am in earnest?"

In the case of any other person, Francine would have instantly seen
through that flimsy pretense. But the love which accepts the meanest
crumbs of comfort that can be thrown to it--which fawns and grovels
and deliberately deceives itself, in its own intensely selfish
interests--was the love that burned in Francine's breast. The wretched
girl believed Mirabel with such an ecstatic sense of belief that she
trembled in every limb, and dropped into the nearest chair.

"_I_ was in earnest," she said faintly. "Didn't you see it?"

He was perfectly shameless; he denied that he had seen it, in the most
positive manner. "Upon my honor, I thought you were mystifying me, and I
humored the joke."

She sighed, and looking at him with an expression of tender reproach. "I
wonder whether I can believe you," she said softly.

"Indeed you may believe me!" he assured her.

She hesitated--for the pleasure of hesitating. "I don't know. Emily is
very much admired by some men. Why not by you?"

"For the best of reasons," he answered "She is poor, and I am poor.