was a boy's whim, too silly to remember."

"You were no boy then," I answered. "You had a mature prudence,--a
careful thoughtfulness for self. Or if otherwise, in your case the
child was indeed father to the man."

"Your love is dead, then, I suppose?" he questioned, with a bitter
smile.

I handed him the book I had been reading. It was marked at these words:
"Love can excuse anything except meanness; but meanness kills love,
cripples even natural affection; without esteem, true love cannot
exist."

William raised his head with an air of proud defiance. "And in what
sense," he asked, "do such words apply to me?"

"You are strangely obtuse," I said. "You see no trace of yourself in
that passage--no trace of meanness in the man who cast off the
penniless orphan, with her whole heart full of love for him, yet pleads
so warmly with the rich heiress, when he knows she is pledged to
another?"

"You have said enough, Juanita," he replied, with concentrated passion.
"This is too much to bear, even from you, from whom I have already
endured so much. You _know_ you do not believe it."

"I _do_ believe it," was my firm reply. It was false, but what did I
care? It served my purpose.

"I might bid you remember," he said, "how I urged you to be mine when
my prospects had grown brighter, and you were poor as before. I might
appeal to the manner in which my suit has been urged for years, as a
proof of my innocence of this charge that you have brought against me.
But I disdain to plead my cause with so unwomanly a heart,--that
measures the baseness of others by what it knows of its own."

He went, and for a time I was left in doubt whether my victory had been
really achieved. Then I thought it all over, and was reassured. He
could not simulate those looks and tones,--no, nor that tumult of
feeling which had made his heart throb so wildly beneath my hand. He
loved me,--that was certain; and no matter how great his anger or his
indignation, my refusal must have cut him to the soul. And the charge I
had made would rankle, too. These thoughts were my comfort when John
told me, with grief and surprise, that his brother had joined the
Arctic expedition under Dr. Kane. I knew it was for no light cause he
would forsake the career just opening so brightly before him.

John and I were married in December, as had been our intention. We led
a quiet, but to him a happy, life. He often wondered at my content with
home and its seclusion,