toward me? I dislike to harbor the thought that you
chose the song, and began to sing it in the manner you did, the moment
you heard me coming."

Had his tone been less angry and stern, her reply might not have been
so bitterly cutting.

"Your questions, Harold, I must say, are pointed ones," she answered,
as, seating herself, she broke into a seemingly disingenuous smile,
and shook her head protestingly; "and it seems to me that they are
utterly uncalled for, too. Our life for the past two years should have
demonstrated that fact. However, to answer your questions: Your
intuitions were correct; I did choose that song purposely for you, and
only began to sing it when I heard you coming. As to the question of
my sentiments toward you: When you remember that it is scarcely twenty
minutes since you, once more, bitterly found fault with me, and that,
too, almost before the servants, because I chose to go out again
to-night, and angrily informed me that you would like to see me here
before I left the house--surely you did not expect to find me trilling
a love-song for you in heart-broken accents! Still, I must say that I
wish you had not made it necessary for me to be so tryingly frank."

Her reply stung him deeply. With tightening lips he turned away, and
muttered under his breath, "I am, indeed, right! She has not the
slightest love left for me; it will delight her to be free."

"Grace," he said, a little sadly--but, unfortunately, also again
sternly--as he halted by her side, "You and I, like so many others,
evidently were not intended for each other."

Her clasped hands tightened, but he did not notice it; he was sure
that he thoroughly understood her now.

"It is a pity," he went on, grimly, with his eyes fixed on the carpet,
"that human nature is not gifted with the faculty of reading the
future; so many mistakes and so much suffering would be prevented."
He was thinking more of the unhappy days she must have spent with him,
during the past two years, than of his own disappointment in her. But
she did not understand the words in this way, and thinking he wanted
her to know what a terrible mistake he had made when he married her,
five years ago, her high-strung, nervous temperament was aroused still
more, and rising quickly, she said, almost recklessly:

"I never knew before, Harold, that you were such a humanitarian and
had such lofty longings to save others suffering; indeed, were you not
evidently so much in