He looks at her standing there, the gold of the sunlight on the richer gold of her hair, the quivering lips pale, the lovely face lovely still, even in the pride and anger that mar its soft childlike beauty. Involuntarily his own softens, his voice grows less hard and firm.

"Nothing," he repeats slowly. "No; it is all over and done with. I suppose I shall forget in time the bitter pain you have given me to-day. I have never loved any woman, I have never wanted any woman, as I have loved and wanted you. I may have seemed harsh and cold often, and so you misjudged me. And this is my punishment. Well, I will not complain. will be happy some day. For me it does not matter. I have always been an unfortunate man. Fate has been very bitter against me."

You

He sighs and looks again at the troubled, downcast face of the girl who has wronged him so cruelly, misjudged him so basely.

"Perhaps it is as well," he goes on, in a strange dreamy voice, as of one who talks in his sleep. "We should never have been happy, even-even if you had loved me. I do not think you could be constant, even you tried."

if

Your opinions of me are always flattering," says Yolande, scornfully.

He smiles faintly.

"You have been fed on sugar so long that all honest food is distasteful," he remarks. "I wish I could feel more angry with you than I do; for Heaven knows your little hand has stabbed me deep enough to-day! How deep you will never know, unless you too learn what it is to lay your whole life down at the foot of one being in the world, and see the folly and uselessness of such an action."

Yolande shivers, as if the breath of winter were upon her instead of the warm luxuriance of summer. Does she not feel even now in her heart's depths the truth of

his words?

Does she not know that even

at this very moment their truth is being painfully realised in the bitter agony that fills her proud and wilful heart?

"There is one question I should like to ask you," he continues. "What did you

mean by the fourteenth of February? I am not aware that I even saw you on that day."

"There is little use to explain now," Yolande says icily, pressing her cold locked fingers tightly together, as if to nerve her for the struggle still before her. "I only wonder that, having through all our intercourse treated me as a heartless coquette, you should suddenly seem to expect I am anything else. You told me my character plainly enough once. You have only yourself to blame if I verify it."

"You are right," he answers calmly. "I have but added one more name

to your list of triumphs. I should have remembered how incapable you must be of appreciating a true man's true love."

Then he moves away, with no other word, or look at the motionless figure and lovely face that in all his days, be they long or short, he knows he can never forget.

VOL. I.

K

CHAPTER X.

OLANDE stands where Denzil Char

teris has left her, listening to the

last echo of his footsteps as they die away in the distance. A curious faint smile comes over her face-a smile that has no mirth, and looks strangely out of place on those sweet red lips.

"So I have won my triumph and kept my vow after all!" she says, in a slow, harsh voice, all unlike her own. "But I seem to understand now what people mean by Dead-Sea fruit.”

A shamed streak of red tinges her pale cheeks. Her eyes wander aimlessly over the green moss, the bubbling water, the suncast shadows. A strange dull pain fills