extraordinary ignorance. I certainly am guiltless of tampering with your affections

"You are, you are! but love springs to life in your smile, and speaks with your voice; and I, weak woman that I am! waited not to be sought," replied Alice, with deep and bitter earnestness. "My lord, I ask no charity for myself, if I have transgressed all bounds of maiden modesty-alas! it may be so, I know not" tears choked her speech, "but I must be true to my own conscience. I dare not make a promise I cannot keep; I dare not feign a shame I cannot feel."

She was no longer the meek, broken-spirited, girl, shrinking from blame or shadow of reproach; her woman's heart had grown strong within her, unshaken in the fearless sanctity of her guileless truth, unshaken in her trust in his chivalrous honour.

"I said once in my haste, that if ever you guessed my love you would despise me. I thank Heaven that I have so greatly erred, for I know that you do not quite contemn me; that Lord Dundee, the high-souled gentleman, would never expose the name of a helpless girl to the jests and mockery of the world for the crime of loving him; nor bestow on her one glance of scorn because she has avowed it. I never dreamed that you could love me; I have lost nothing, nay, I am doubly rich, now that I have a double right of esteeming you above all earthly beings, and of praying for you every hour of my future life. You have given it to me, but you cannot take it back."

"Coward!" muttered Lord Dundee to himself,

"how long wilt thou hold the sword over this defenceless head?"

"Yes, Alice, I can. I have no more power to give that right than you to receive it. I have not the courage to bid you banish every vestige of our friendship from your mind, but, if you have ever nourished for me one single thought more warm than that which a daughter might bear to a parent, a friend to a friend, cast it forth as an adder which will one day sting you to the heart's core. Think of Dundee, sometimes; join his name to your pure prayers; but think of him only as an outlawed, ruined, man, bound on a journey whence he will never return alive; as one who will not cross your path again—who most bitterly regrets that ever he crossed it to your sorrow; and, Alice, never else."

"As my guardian, my friend, my benefactor, my all; to the last moment of my existence, on my dying bed, beyond the grave itself; while God, who gave into my heart the deep love I bear you, shall grant me sense and memory to cherish it!" she answered in a low voice, but with a passionate tenderness which wrung his heart to hear.

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Oh, Alice, why will you not understand what else I must speak? No love can live between us. I cannot accept you must not offer it. Alice....I a married."

am

A voice, not hers-not like any human articulation, repeated in a faint, hollow echo

"Married!"

"Long ago-years before we met. I love my wife."

You might have seen that brave man's heart beat; you might almost have heard its loud, distinct throbs in the silence which ensued-that audible silence which thrills upon the nerves like the hush round some supernatural presence-if the foe he had that evening slain had arisen to confront him he would have been less awed-for never did human face upon which the stillness of annihilation had once descended show to living eye an expression so ghastly as the dull blank of that countenance from which thought, sense, and feeling had been struck out at once. She did not utter a sound-her heart had not moved, it was as lead in her breast-her eyes were distended and mindless—her lips grey and stiff—she breathed— she stood upright—but as far as sight, hearing, motion, and reason were concerned, she was for those moments dead-mute, frozen into stone, by the horror of great darkness which had fallen upon her.

He tried to unclasp the rigid, marble-cold hands, locked together with the tenacity of despair, but at the first contact of his soft, caressing fingers, whose touch spoke so eloquently the compassion his tongue lacked power to convey, an electric convulsion darted through every limb-woke soul and sense; she shuddered away from him, and with a low, prolonged cry like the wail of a lost spirit for its Eden, crouched together, as if she had been too mean and vile to see the light, and were calling to the earth to hide her.

"Oh God, that I had never seen, never heard, never known you! Oh God! that I had died that night, that I could die now!"

"What great and unpardonable crime have I committed that I should be compelled to do and see this?" thought Lord Dundee, with unspeakable bitterness, as he looked helplessly on. Fain would he have comforted but what consolation that he could have offered would have been aught but an empty mockery? Uncompromising duty, undeviating rectitude, had unsealed his lips and placed the dagger in his hand— the thrust had gone too truly home-he had no power to draw the weapon back—and must perforce stand by to behold the throes of the stricken deer, with the death-barb quivering in her side. The stern soldier, inured to every type and shade of misery, thought that he had never known or seen wretchedness until

now.

"No, Alice-no, my poor child, say not so, you are too young to know despair-too young to know love. You have dreamed in the solitary musings of your guileless soul, and created for yourself the image you have worshipped, believing that love which was but its reflection and its presage. Wait patiently until the shock of this discovery has passed away, and you will know me as I am—a worldly, ambitious man, hardened by perpetual strife with all that is most coarse and hardening in this warfare of existence-unworthy to gain, had I ever been free to seek, such angelic affection. You will not wish to die when I am forgotten, and long years of joy and mutual love are opening freshly before you."

"I will not have time to wish for it-I have my death-stroke," she said, laying her right hand on her

breast, and casting round her a wandering, searching glance, moaning in faint long-drawn gasps as if the strangled breath would barely come. broken-my eyes are dim―the life is Oh my shame, my shame!"

"My heart is gone from me.

"Ah never, Alice! never could it come nigh one so pure as thee! Sorrow, suffering, have come-delusion, blindness, fatality, all have been leagued against thy happiness; but not shame, not shame, sweet Alice!"

"Shame in my own sight-remorse before Heaven," she exclaimed with wild energy, "for I have sinned, and my sin has found me out! Oh, was that Heaven itself sworn against me, that this was always hidden from me, to crush me so at last!"

Her white lips seemed to refuse their service, as, rocking herself to and fro, like one in some intolerable bodily pain, she leaned against the dark pillar of the chimney, and no sound came from those still parted lips but the heavy, tearless sobs which revealed the agony of a heart they could not relieve-while the viscount pondered on the extraordinary and miserable fatality which could have kept Alice in such profound ignorance of a fact so generally known as his marriage.

"My kinsfolk, my cousin Glencarrig, is it possible that they never informed you, never tried to enlighten you on this subject?

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They never knew my love-no human creature knew. Why should I accuse them? On me alone be the reproach and the punishment, for I am an idolater for I love you not as women love in this world, but as a Christian worships his God -as