are not married! Mamma met

some

people like that at Spa last year; it was so awkward, for she had made quite friends with them!"

She stops abruptly, for the woman she addresses has turned ghastly, unaccountably pale. The evening is one of extraordinary stillness. On the satiny water the heavens lie exactly copied, cloud for cloud, clear sky-field for `clear sky-field! That strange pallid effulgence-lessened indeed, fainting away by slow degrees into obscurity-is yet still there; effulgence not of the gold and carmines and purples that one usually associates with sunset; but of a paler, whiter, lunar quality.

an

Again those sobs rise in her throat. Oh, lovely, ironical world! when will you cease jeering us in our misery? And now it is night. She has gone to bid her husband good-night. Often, on previous occasions, she has omitted this ceremony as nugatory; but now a morbid impulse to be at

all events lacking in no little dues of courtesy towards him, possesses her.

She finds him sitting stooped over his hearth, with his empty gruel-basin beside him, and his fleshless hands absorbing the last warmth of the expiring fire.

"I have come to say good-night."
"Have you? Good-night."

Now that the ceremony is concluded, it is clear that he expects her to retire; but still she lingers, and again that longing to fall on her knees and tell him all sweeps over her. Poor old man! How old and

feeble and lonely he looks!

"You are not ill?" she says, unsteadily. "According to you, I am never ill," replies he drily; "I enjoy the most robust health; if I were to tell you that I were ill, you would discredit the assertion!"

"Oh, but I should not," she cries remorsefully; "I quite believe that you often, often suffer. Is there is therenothing I can do for

you

"You can shut the door," replies he,

VOL. III.

56

with a snarl; "a thing that, since the beginning of my acquaintance with you, I have never known you do! and since it is already past my usual hour for retiring to bed, I will ask you to shut it upon the outside!"

"Look up! There is a small bright cloud

Alone amid the skies;

So high, so pure, and so apart,
A woman's honour lies."

A

ND now the night has to be faced. With what dread has

she watched the slow declension

of the summer evening; but no dread comes up to the reality, to the miserable endless hours of hand-to-hand fighting with the terrible battalions of thought and remorses, that come up, ever fresh and fresh, against her; that, while all around. her are softly sleeping, take her by the throat in the blackness, and will not let

her go. To no dream or nightmare, indeed, does she give the opportunity to torment her, for she makes no attempt to sleep. Fully dressed, widely, burningly awake, she sits all night writing, writing, writing endless letters of farewell to him, who, parted from her only by a flimsy lath-andplaster partition, lies tossing in the light and uneasy dozes of old age. How many

does she write? They must be a score, at least; prayers for forgiveness, cries of remorse; and no sooner are they written than she tears them all. Prayers for forgiveness of a wrong that is unforgivable! Cries of remorse for a sin that her action shows she has not really repented of! Why insult him by such? The dawn has come by the time that she has at length written the three lines which, without reading over-if she read them over, she knows that she would tear them too-she feverishly folds and places in an envelope. In them there is neither petition nor repentance.