Mr. Kirke and Eunice were still absent when Orrin paid his second call at the Parsonage that day. He had conducted Jessie home in the forenoon—a drenched and shivering figure, at which Patsey screeched with terror; stayed long enough to learn from the girl that the preventives he had ordered against cold were administered, and that her young mistress was put comfortably to bed, after which he betook himself to the hotel to make the requisite changes in his own apparel.

"Miss Jessie hopes you'll stay here, sir," remarked Patsey. "She says you'll find dry things in Mr. Kirke's room. I've just laid 'em out all ready."

"I am much obliged to Miss Jessie and to you, my good girl; but I shall run no risk in going down to the village. Say to Miss Jessie that she will hear from, or see me again before night."

Three hours later, a messenger brought a note, inquiring how Jessie was, and if she would be quite able to see him in the evening.

"For I must return to Hamilton to-morrow," he added.

Jessie wrote one line in reply:

"I am up and well. Come whenever you please.

Gratefully,
J. K."

His pleasure was to delay the visit until twilight. Perhaps he had a difficult programme to arrange; perhaps he wanted to give Jessie time to recover strength and composure, or he may have thought that delay would enhance the value of his society. On the legal principle he had enunciated when Roy's prior engagement was under discussion, we ought to accept his own explanation of his tardiness.

"I could not come earlier," he said very gravely, in reply to Jessie's faltered gratitude and fears that he had suffered from the morning's adventure. "You needed rest and quiet, and I have been unhinged all day—mentally, I mean. Don't thank me again! You don't know how like mockery phrases of acknowledgment from you to me sound. Sit down. You are still weak and nervous. You are trembling all over."

If she was, it was not from cold or debility. He placed her in an armchair, brought a shawl from the hall, and folded it about her; turned away abruptly, and walked the room in a silence she had neither words nor courage to break. The piano stood open as he had left it in the morning. He stopped before it on his tenth round, seated himself, and began a prelude. Then he sang the ballad she had crooned in the amber sunset, so many, many months ago! while he listened without, and tore the hearts out of Eunice's roses.

He gave the first verse with tenderness that was exquisite; rendered the musing ecstasy of the dream with beauty and expression that thrilled the auditor with delicious pain. This deepened into agony under the passionate melancholy of the last stanza:

He came back to where she sat—all bowed together, and quivering in every limb—and knelt before her.

"Jessie, I have dreamed, and I am awake. I am here to-night, to ask you to forgive, not only the rash, presumptuous words I spoke this morning, but the feeling that gave them birth. I have loved you from the moment of our first meeting. You and Heaven are my witnesses how I have striven with my unwarrantable passion,—how, persuaded that the indulgence of this would be a rank offence against honor and friendship, I resisted by feigned coldness your innocent wiles to win the good-will of Roy's relative. I deluded myself, for a time, with the belief that I could control the proofs of my affection within the bounds of brotherly regard. You best know how, when your faith in the truth of your accepted lover was shaken, I became his champion; how conscientiously and laboriously I have pleaded his cause with you; tried to be faithful to the trust he had reposed in me;—how, when I had nearly betrayed myself in an unguarded moment, I endeavored to dissipate any suspicions that my imprudence might have awakened in your mind. Again and again I have avoided you for days and months together; punished myself for my involuntary transgression against my friend by denying myself the sight of that which was dearer and more to be desired in my esteem than all the world and heaven itself; have shut myself into outer darkness from the light of your eyes and the sound of your voice. The fruit of the toils, the anguish, the precautions of more than a year, was destroyed to-day by one outburst of ungovernable emotion.

"I shall dream no more, dear! I solemnly vow this on my knees, while I beg you to say that you do not despise me!"

The bowed head was upon his shoulder now, and she was weeping. He put his arm about her, and held her close, while he prayed her to be comforted.

"I have cost you many painful thoughts, and not a few tears since the day when you told me the story of old David Dundee, over there in the window," he said, sadly. "It would have been better—much better for you had you never seen or heard of me. These tears are all for me, I know. But, indeed, darling, I am not worthy of one of them. They make me feel yet more keenly what a villain I must seem to you."

"Don't say that!" she burst forth. "If you are unworthy in your own sight, what must I think of my conduct? You were under no vow; had professed to love no other, had entered into no compact in the name of God, to be constant to one—one only—while life endured; a compact you called as sacred and binding as marriage. I loathe myself when I think of my fickleness and falsehood. I do not deserve to receive the love of any true man. There is, at times, a bitter tonic in the idea that I may be better worth Roy Fordham's acceptance than I would be of another's who had never deceived the trust of the woman who loved him."

She sat upright, and laughed, in saying it. "We—he and I—could not upbraid one another on the score of inconstancy."

"I will not have you depreciate yourself. You have been true to the letter of your vow. There are some feelings that defy control. Listen to me, dearest," sitting down by her. "This is a world of mismatched plans,—of blighted hopes and fruitless regrets. But the wise do not defy Fate. They look, instead, for the sparkle of some gem amid the ashes of desolation. Let us be brave since we cannot be hopeful. I can never forget you,—never cease to think of you as the dearest and noblest of women. The memory will be more to me than any possession in the gift of Fortune. No change of external circumstances can make us less to one another than we are now, while to the world we can never be more. Nothing is further from my wishes or designs than to weaken your regard for the strength of a compact so solemn as that which binds you to your betrothed. He is a good man, and he will cherish you kindly and faithfully. It may be a hard saying, but we are dealing in no mock reserves now, love; and however weakly my heart may shrink from pronouncing the doom of my happiness, I ought not to disguise from myself or you the truth, that, as he has done nothing since your betrothal to forfeit your esteem, you should fulfil your promise whenever he shall claim it."

"Which he may never do!" Jessie interrupted the forced calmness of the argument. "I heard a terrible story a month ago—one that has driven sleep from my eyes for whole nights since. Did you ever hear that my mother was insane for many years before she died?"

It was too dark to see her features, but Orrin felt the strong shudder that ran over her; saw the gesture that seemed to tear the dreadful secret from her breast.

She went on wildly. "That the loving words and caresses, the recollection of which has fed my heart from my babyhood, the tales and songs and sketches that were my choicest pleasures then, were the vagaries of an unsettled mind; that she knew nothing aright after I, miserable little wretch! was born! Not even her own and only child! That, through all these years I have been worshipping a beautiful myth! I never had a mother! Oh! that I had died while I still believed in her!"

The cry of the last sentence was of hopeless bereavement, and the specious actor beside her sat appalled at the might of a woe beyond his conception.

She resumed before he could reply.

"I ought never to marry! Accursed from the beginning, I should finish my shadowed life alone. You talk of the gifts of Fortune. The best she can offer me now are quiet and obscurity. I have written all this to Mr. Fordham. He knows, by this time, that I am a less desirable partner for his fastidious and untainted self than was the poor girl whose only crime was that her sister had died of consumption,—that a deadlier malady is my birthright!"

"You have written this to Roy?" exclaimed Orrin, in stern earnest. "Without consultation with your sister or father?"

"Why should I consult them? Having deceived me for twenty years or more, they would not be likely to tell me the truth now. The story came indirectly to me, from the daughter of my mother's nurse, who lived here herself as a servant when I was born. Afterward I saw and talked with the woman myself. Nothing but the whole truth would satisfy me. Her account was clear and circumstantial. There is no mistake."

"The woman is a lying gossip—a malicious or weak-minded slanderer. You have acted hastily and most unwisely!" Orrin said, in seriousness that commanded her attention. "This tale is not a new one to me. Your sister informed me that there was such a figment in circulation before you went to Mrs. Baxter."

He rehearsed Eunice's description of her step-mother's invalidism, softening such portions of it as might, he feared, tend to feed the daughter's unhealthy fancies.

"Your father and your family physician will tell you that her disease was physical. Her low, nervous state and hysterical symptoms were concomitants to this, as were her indisposition to see strangers, and inability to go abroad. It is your duty to write this explanation to Roy. He had your father's version of the case, when he asked his sanction to his addresses to yourself. You must tell him that this was the correct one."

"To what purpose would all this be?" He had never heard her speak sullenly until now. "Better that he should part from me on this pretext than upon the ground which my farther confession would furnish."

She said the concluding words so indistinctly that Orrin did not catch their purport, or his rejoinder would have been different and less prompt.

"For the sake of your mother's memory!" he urged, gently. "The mother who, you are again persuaded, both knew and loved you."

She was still for a moment.

"You are right," she said then. "It would be base to screen my faithlessness at the expense of her reputation. I am cowardly—but indeed, indeed, it is not an easy task to undeceive him. He trusts me implicitly! If you had read his letters! And I do still value his esteem. I believed in him so long, you know. But I will tell him all! It is just that I should be spared no humiliation!"

To Wyllys this was sheer raving, yet it sounded dangerous.

"What do you mean?" he queried, in an altered tone.

Instead of replying, she hid her face in her hands—(how well he remembered the old action!)—and moaned.

He touched her shoulder, less in caress than admonition, as he asked, "Tell him what? Why do you speak of humiliation?"

"Because he still believes in me , I tell you! He will scorn me when I confess that my heart has changed—that I can never love him again, as I fancied I did once!" she whispered, as if ashamed to say it aloud. "He will cast me off—free me at once and forever."

The temptation was powerful, and the Thug yielded to it, without a struggle.

"And if he should, darling? What then?" he said, tightening his arm about her waist.

" You should not ask me!" in a yet lower whisper.

Had the dusk allowed, she might have seen a smile of triumph upon his face; an involuntary uprearing of the head as from the binding of the bay of victory about his brows. In affections and in spirit, she lay at his feet—her love confessed, her destiny in his power. Did he wish, for one insane instant, that his acting were reality, that, with clean heart and hands, he could fold her in his embrace, and call her by the name which is the seal and glory of loving womanhood? make her his honored and beloved Wife?

We are all human, and there may have gaped in that one wild second, an hitherto unsuspected joint in his harness of unscrupulous egotism. If this were so, he conquered the weakness before he again spoke.

"Jessie, this is sheer madness! My beautiful angel! why have you made me love you only that both our hearts should be broken at last? Do you know what you are doing? Do not injure yourself fatally in the estimation of all your friends by cancelling this engagement. Your father has talked much to me of the comfort it is to him. He loves and honors Fordham; is happy in his old age in the anticipation of giving you into his keeping. This will be a crushing blow to his pride and affection. And Fordham! you do not comprehend what a terrible thing his anger is. I, who have seen him aroused, warn you not to make him your lifelong enemy. These calm, slow natures are vindictive beyond the possibility of your conception."

"Yet you would have me trust myself and my happiness in his keeping? When I have said that I do not love him! Have you read my nature to so little purpose as to think that fear will drive, where affection does not lead me?"

Her spirit was rising. He knew the signs of her mood, and that the sharpest of the struggle between her will and his was to come. He made ready his last shaft.

"Leave things as they are! If I plead earnestly, it is because there is so much at stake. For me, as for you! Do not tempt me to perjury and dishonor. Help me to keep my integrity by holding fast to your own! Believe me, who have seen more of life and human inconsistency than your virgin fancy ever pictured, when I say that crossed loves are the rule, love-marriages the exception in this crooked, shadowed world. By and by, you—both of us—will learn quietness of soul, if not content, and nobody surmise the secret of the locked heart-chambers which are consecrated to one another."

"Perjury! dishonor!" repeated Jessie, bewildered. "By what oath are you bound? I do not understand!"

"You have heard no report, then, of the business which brought me to Dundee? Has not Mrs. Baxter or Miss Provost written to you of my engagement?"

"Engagement!" still wonderingly.

"I am engaged to be married, Jessie!" mournfully firm.

"To whom?"

He just caught the gasp, for her throat and tongue were too dry for perfect articulation.

"To Hester Sanford."

Without another word, she got up and groped her way to the mantel.

Orrin followed.

"What is it?" he asked, tenderly.

"I want the matches! Ah, here they are!"

She struck one, the blue flame showing a ghastly face above it, lighted the lamp, and motioned Orrin to a seat opposite her own, at the centre-table.

"Now!" she said, interlacing her fingers upon the table, and leaning over them in an attitude of attention. "Go on with what you were saying."

If she had expected him to show embarrassment, she was foiled. He put his hand upon hers before he began, and although she drew it back, he felt that it was clay-cold, and judged rightly that his real composure would outlast her counterfeit.

"What could I do?" he said, beseechingly. "You were lost to me as surely as though you were already married or dead. If I am to blame for obeying the reckless impulse to double-bar the door separating us—to divide myself from you by a gulf so wide that expectancy, desire, and hope would perish in attempting to cross it, you are scarcely the one to upbraid me for the deed. More marriages are contracted in desperation than from mutual love. I said: 'If I am ever cured, it will be by this means.' Miss Sanford was not unpropitious to my advances. I will not insult your common-sense by pretending that her evident partiality flattered or attracted me—much less that I ever felt one throb of tenderness for her. Since I could never love another woman, what difference did it make who bore my name and kept my house? It were better—so I reasoned—to marry one whose supreme self-love would prevent her from divining my indifference and its cause, who was shallow-hearted, insensitive, and obtuse of wit, than one who, gauging my feelings by her own, would expect a devotion I could not feign—

"But I cannot talk of Miss Sanford and my new bonds, here, and now! I thought myself armed at every point for self-justification when I came to you. One ray from your eyes showed me my error."

"Perjury! dishonor!" reiterated Jessie, without moving the eyes that were fast filling with disdain. "It is from these that I am to save you? You perjured yourself when you told that girl that you loved her—and tell it to her you did, or she would not have accepted your hand. Other men have sought her in marriage, and she would be exacting as to the form of your proposal. You dishonored yourself and the name of wedded love in every vow you made her. From this sin, at least, I am free. When I promised to marry Roy Fordham, I thought I understood my own feelings. And my heart was his! If I could forget the mad, wicked dream that divides me from that season of purity and gladness, I would peril my soul to do it! You speak of the sanctity of my engagement; of the integrity that bids you hold fast to yours. We will pass over the first. It was a sacred thing, and a precious, once, before the serpent left his loathsome trail upon it. But where was your integrity when you talked to me of love, just now? when you deliberately prefaced the announcement of your betrothal by the declaration that the memory of me must always be more to you than any earthly possession? Was this loyal? Was it honorable, or even honest? I believe that I have loved you, Orrin Wyllys! I believe, moreover, that you have tried to win my love—for what end the Maker of us both alone knows. If I have been weak, you have been wicked. I see it all now—step by step! fall after fall! And to crown the injury you have done me with insult, you adjure me to save you from temptation to perjury by heaping lie upon lie, in continuing to assert by actions, if not by direct protestation, that I love a man to whom I am indifferent. You have sold yourself for Hester Sanford's millions. You would have me sell myself, soul and body, for expediency and convenience—and to avert Roy Fordham's lasting enmity. That is the case, stripped of sentimental verbiage."

"Jessie!"

"I have no affection for him, or for any one else! No faith! no hope!" she pursued, towering above him like a lost but menacing spirit. "You saved my life this morning. You make of that benefit a wrong to-night, by robbing life of all that it held of sweetness and comfort; by showing me what a coarse bit of gilded clay I—poor fool! have worshipped. I wish you had let me drown!"

"Jessie! are you mad?"

He had arisen with her, and would have drawn nearer to her side, but she waved him off. There was a terrible beauty in her wrath that fascinated him, in spite of her cutting words.

"I was a happy, trustful child when you crossed my path. I am a hard, bitter, suspicious woman—and the change is your work. You have humbled me forever in my own eyes, by letting me into the dark secrets of my instability and idiotic credulity. I care not what others think of me. I shall write to Mr. Fordham before I sleep, and release him; if he still considers himself bound to me, shall tell him plainly that my love is dead—and my heart!"

"You will judge me more mercifully, and yourself more justly one day, Jessie. Your self-reproaches pain me more than do your vituperations against myself. Nothing you can say in your present mood can alter my feelings for you. You have had much to try you, to-day, my poor child! When you are cooler, you will retract—mentally at least—the charges you have brought against one whose heart is now—and always will be—your own. You know me better than you think. I can wait for time and your sober reason to right me. Implacable as I know Fordham to be, under his impassive demeanor, he will be more lenient to what he will esteem my breach of trust—the wrong I have done him—when once he has heard my defence, than you are at this moment."

"You suppose, then, that I am going to lodge a complaint against you?" she said, contemptuously. "I shall not mention your name. I should be ashamed to own who was the cause of my folly. You have nothing to dread from your cousin's anger."

And, although his last remark was a "feeler," designed to elicit such an assurance, this speech stung him more sharply than had the volley of invectives that preceded it.

Mr. Kirke and Eunice did not return until midnight. Jessie had the evening to herself, and the letter to Roy was sent to the post-office before she went to bed.

It was short and decisive to unkindness:

"When I wrote to you, last week," was the unceremonious commencement,—"I said that I would await your reply before sending another letter. I believed that the information contained in the former would be the means of terminating our engagement. I have learned since that the story was a malicious or idle exaggeration. My mother died, as she had lived, a sane woman. But this matters little so far as our relation to one another is concerned. Another, and an insuperable obstacle to our union, exists in the change of my feelings toward yourself. If I ever loved you—I think, sometimes, I never did—I love you no longer. Months of doubt and suffering have brought me to the determination to confess this without reserve. I offer no extenuation of my fickleness. I ought to have remained constant, but I have not. May you choose more happily and wisely in the future!

"I write this without conference with my father or sister,—in the knowledge, also, that my change of purpose and prospects will be a sorrow and a surprise to both. But I cannot hesitate or draw back. I need hardly say that I have entered into pledges with no one else. No one desires that I should, or seeks to win my affections. It rests with you to give me the release I ask of your generosity and humanity, or to hold me to the letter of my bond. If, having learned the extent of the change that has come over me since I gave it, you insist upon the fulfilment of my promise, I shall submit to your decision.

"Foreseeing what your action will be, it only remains for me to add that your gifts and letters await your order.

" Jessamine Kirke. "

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