she did was to move to the door, peep out into the lobby, then, closing the door rapidly, she faced him again.

The expression of her face was curious to behold. It was a strange mixture of devilry and effrontery. She wore the dress she had worn in the theatre-her arms, neck, and bosom were still naked and covered with diamonds; and her eyes flashed with a beautiful but forbidding light.

"So it is you!" she said in a low voice.

"At last!"

He stood before her like a man of marble, livid, ghastly, unable to speak, but surveying her with eyes of infinite despair. The sickly scent he had noticed in the room clung about her, and filled the air he was breathing.

There was a long silence. At last, unable any longer to bear his steadfast gaze, she laughed sharply, and, tripping across the room, threw herself in a chair.

“Well?" she said, looking up at him with a wicked smile.

His predominant thought then found a broken utterance. "It is true, then !—and I believed you dead!”

"No doubt," she answered, showing her white teeth maliciously, "and you are doubtless very sorry to find yourself mistaken. No, I am very much alive, as you see. I would gladly have died to oblige you, but it was impossible, mon cher. But won't you take a seat ? We can talk as well sitting as standing, and I am very tired."

Almost involuntarily, he obeyed her, and taking a chair sat down, still with his wild eyes fixed upon her face.

"My God!" he murmured. "And you are still the same after all these years."

She leant back in her chair, surveying him critically. It was obvious that her light manner concealed a certain dread of him; for her bare bosom rose and fell quickly, and her breath came in short sharp pants.

"And you, my dear Ambrose, are not much changed-a little older, of course, for you were only a foolish boy then, but still very much the same. I suppose, by your clerical necktie, that you have gone into the Church? Have you got on well? I am sure I hope so, with all my heart; and I always said you were cut out for that kind of life."

He listened to her like one listening to some evil spirit in a dream.

It was difficult for him to believe the evidence of his own He had been so certain that the woman was dead and buried past recall!

senses.

"How did you find me out?" she asked.

"I saw you at the theatre, and followed you home."

"Eh bien!" she exclaimed, with a very doubtful French pronunciation. "What do you want with me?"

Nothing!
Then springing

a large box of

"Want with you?" he repeated. "My God! She laughed again, flashing her teeth and eyes. up, she approached a small table, and took up cigarettes. Her white hand trembled violently. "Can I offer you a cigarette?" she said, glancing at him over her naked shoulder.

"( No, no!"

"With your permission I will light one myself!" she said, striking a wax match and suiting the action to the word. Then, holding the cigarette daintily between her white teeth, she again sat down, facing him. "Well, I am glad you have not come to make a scene. It is too late for that. We agreed to part long ago, and it was all for the best."

"You left me," he answered in a hollow voice.

"Just so," she replied, watching the thin cloud of smoke as it wreathed from her lips. "I left you because I saw we could never get along together. It was a stupid thing of us to marry, but it would have been a still stupider thing to remain tied together like two galley-slaves. I was not the little innocent fool you supposed me, and you were not the swell I at first imagined; so we were both taken in. I went to India with young St. Clare, and after he left me I was very ill, and a report, which I did not contradict, got into the papers that I had died. I went on the stage out there under an assumed name, and some years ago returned to England."

"And now," he asked with more decision than he had yet shown," how are you living?"

He rose and stood frowning over her, and despite her assumedsang-froid she looked a little alarmed.

"Because, when all is said and done, I am your husband! Whatever you now call yourself, you are the same Mary Goodwin whom I married at Oxford ten years ago, and the tie which links us together has never been legally broken. Yet I find you here, living in luxury, and, I suppose, in infamy. Who pays for it all? Who is your present victim ?"

With an impatient gesture and a flash of her white teeth she

threw her cigarette into the fire, and rose up before him, trembling with fear or anger.

"Do you

"So you have found your tongue at last!" she said. think I am afraid of you? No, I defy you! This is my house, and if you are not civil I will have you turned out of it. Bah! it is like you to come threatening me, at the eleventh hour.”

Her petulant rage did not deceive him; it was only a mask hastily assumed to conceal her growing alarm.

"Answer my question, Mary!-how are you living?"

"Sit down quietly, and I will tell you."

He obeyed her, covering his eyes with his hand. She watched him for a moment; then reassured by his subdued manner, she proceeded.

"I am not sure that I ought to tell you, but I dare say you would find out. Lord Ombermere

"Lord Ombermere!" echoed the clergyman. "Why, to my knowledge, he has a wife-and children."

She shrugged her white shoulders, with a little grimace à la mode française.

"For the rest, I know

He is very good to me, sent me to France and

"That is his affair, not mine," she said. the fact, and never trouble myself about it. and awfully rich. I have all I want. He had me taught French and music; and he has settled a competence upon our boy. That is how the matter stands. I do pretty much as I like, but if Eustace knew I had a husband actually living he would make a scene, and perhaps we should have to part."

"Is it possible ?-and-and are you happy?"

Bradley paced up and down the chamber in agitation. "Such a life is an infamy," he at last exclaimed. offence against man and God."

"It is an

"I know all that cant, and I suppose you speak as a clergyman ; but I do my duty by the man who keeps me, and never-like some I could name-have intrigues with other men. It wouldn't be fair, and it wouldn't pay. I hope," she added, as if struck suddenly by the thought, "you have not come here to-night imagining I shall return to you?"

He recoiled as if from a blow.

"Return to me? God forbid !

"So say I, though you might put it a little more politely. By the way, I forgot to ask you,—but perhaps you yourself have married again ?"

The question came suddenly like a stab. fresh horror, holding his hand upon his heart.

Bradley started in She exclaimed :—

"You might have done so, you know, thinking me food for worms, and if such were the case you may be sure I should never have betrayed you. No; 'live and let live' is my motto. I am not such a fool as to suppose you have never looked at another woman; and if you had consoled yourself, taking some nice, pretty, quiet, homely creature, fit to be a clergyman's wife, to mend his stockings, and to visit the sick with rolls of flannel and bottles of beef-tea, I should have thought you had acted like a sensible man."

It was too horrible. He felt stifled, asphyxiated. He had never before encountered such a woman, though their name is legion in all the Babylons, and he could not understand her. With a deep frown he rose to his feet.

"Are you going?" she cried. each other!"

"Pray don't, till we understand

He turned and fixed his eyes despairingly upon her, looking so worn, so miserable, that even her hard heart was touched.

"Try to think I am really dead," she said, " and it will be all right. I have changed both my life and my name, and no one of my old friends knows me. I don't act. Eustace wanted to take a theatre for me, but, after all, I prefer idleness to work, and I am not likely to reappear. I have no acquaintances out of theatrical circles, where I am known only as Mrs. Montmorency. So you see there is no danger, mon cher. Let me alone, and I shall let you alone. You can marry again whenever you like."

Again she touched that cruel chord, and again he seemed like a man stabbed.

"Marry?" he echoed. "But I am not free!

wife."

You are still my

"I deny it," was the answer. "We are divorced; I divorced myself. It is just the same as if we had gone before the judge: a course you will surely never adopt, for it would disgrace you terribly, and ruin me, perhaps. Eustace is horribly proud, and if it should all come out about his keeping me, he would never forgive me. No, no, you'll never be such a fool !"

Yet she watched him eagerly, as if anxious for some assurance that he would not draw her into the open daylight of a legal prosecution.

He answered her, as if following her own wild thoughts

"Why should I spare you? Why should I drag on my lifetime, tied by the law to a shameless woman? Why should I keep your

secret and countenance your infamy? Do you take me for one of those men who have no souls, no consciences, no honour? Do you think that I will bear the horror of a guilty secret, now I know that you live, and that God has not been merciful enough to rid me of such a curse?"

It was the first time he had seemed really violent. In his pain he almost touched her with his clenched hand.

"You had better not strike me!" she cried viciously.

At this moment the door opened, and a little boy (the same Bradley had seen at the theatre) ran eagerly in. He was dressed in a suit of black velvet, with bows of coloured ribbon, and, though he was pale and evidently delicate, he looked charmingly innocent and pretty.

"Maman! maman!" he cried in French.

She turned angrily, answering him in the same tongue"Que cherchez-vous, Bébé? Allez-vous-en!"

"Maman, je viens vous souhaiter une bonne nuit.”

"Allez, allez," she replied impatiently, "je viendrai vous baiser quand vous serez couché."

With a wondering look at the stranger, the child ran from the

room.

The interruption seemed to have calmed them both. There was a brief silence, during which Bradley gazed drearily at the door through which the child had vanished, and his companion seemed lost in thought.

The time has perhaps come to explain that, if this worldly and sin-stained woman had one redeeming virtue, it was love for her little boy. True, she showed it strangely, being subject to curious aberrations of mood. The child was secretly afraid of her. Sometimes she would turn upon him, for some trivial fault, with violent passion; the next moment she would cover him with kisses and load him with toys. In her heart she adored him; indeed, he was the only thing in the world that she felt to be her own. She knew how terribly his birth, when he grew up, would tell against his chances in life, and she had so managed matters that Lord Ombermere had settled a large sum of money unconditionally upon the child; which money was already invested for him, in his mother's name, in substantial Government securities. Her own relation with Ombermere, I may remark in passing, was a curious one. Whenever he was in London, his lordship dropped in every afternoon at about four, as "Mr. Montmorency"; he took a cup of tea in company with mother and child; at a quarter to six precisely he looked