Alice's home that neither her beauty nor her sweetness would command this homage without the splendor also. "It was the conduct of a silly girl," she said to herself, dwelling still upon the moment before they went out. "I will do better," she said, "next time." But next time did not

come.

Ordronnaux' nature was a strangely inflammable one, and a hurt healed but slowly under its feverish stress. Proud and pained, he could not submit to such a rebuff again; and, while still smarting, he resolved to woo Emilia no more in the old way. Perhaps he was angry with her, the least in the world: for all that, his passion was none the less-only every throb of the unanswered love was all the greater pang for the anger that made it so sore. Some natural self-respect told him that she did not know him; he saw that he had been too precipitate; he hoped that many days of closer life alone with him might reveal to her a side that was worthy of her affection; he determined to take her away,as soon as the period which had been given out as that of their intended stay had elapsed,-to his home, where in much seclusion she could learn to lean on him, and where he would surround her with silent tenderness, but never annoy her again with expression of it till the time seemed ripe.

Poor Ordronnaux! He was not accustomed to this self-abasement. So far his life had been a success; he had wished for little that did not come with the wish; fortune had smiled upon him, and so had women and now the only woman whose smile could make his sunshine was colder than snow. He had been in many respects a fine fellow, generous, brave, kind and gentle; he had hardly any conceit,-thinking that much was due to circumstance and little to himself, that prodigality was no virtue when one cared nothing for what was squandered, that courage was an easy thing where there was no constitutional timidity, that misfortune had never tried his temper. He did not pride himself upon his integrity; anything other than integrity he would have believed impossible to an Ordronnaux. He was not a handsome man; though one who loved him would have found a rough grandeur in the straight, strong lines of his dark face, and his smile was an illumination. Doubtless if Emilia, ignorant as she was of all experience of love, had been thrown into his society, and al

lowed to remain without feeling herself an object of too passionate pursuit, without having all her antagonism aroused by undue pressure, without being sullied by the suggestion that her beauty was at barter for his wealth, without having every avenue of romance closed upon her too, she would have felt for him eventually some degree of attachment. Now, in spite of her resolve to do better,-perhaps somewhat because he afforded her no opportunity to carry out the resolve,-when she saw Ordronnaux opposite her in the carriage, silent and abstracted, the sight sometimes gave her a disdainful repulsion; as she took his arm to enter an assembly,-rustling and glittering though she were in the luster of his gifts, it was almost with a quiver of abhorrence. She was afraid of herself; she prayed every night of her life that she might be made to love her husband-and resented his existence every morning.

But Ordronnaux did not fail in any observance. He addressed her as Emilia, and remembering, it might be, that in his mother's church it was held that by assuming the attitude of receiving the living grace, grace could not fail to come, he followed a course of conduct which by taking it for granted that everything was right between them, might some day, through sheer force of habit, make it so. That Emilia should not feel this reducing her to the level of a household pet, and revolt against it, tacitly and decently, but with all her strength, was not to be expected. Tacit as the revolt was, Ordronnaux, of course, was aware of it; yet why such devotion should be repugnant to her who had never known a lover he did not understand. Sometimes he was conscious of a resentment on his own part, a dull, smoldering resentment in which there was, nevertheless, a spark of fire,—a resentment against the coldness, the silence, the daily robbery of happiness, the withholding of the smiles that should be his, the veiling of the emotions he should share,

yet he smothered it, knowing that she had promised nothing, that it was his task. to win all. Still, he was possessed with eagerness to know the nature that she hid. Thus he kept her under survey-every word, glance, gesture; nothing escaped him If she looked lingeringly at a landscape he remembered it ineffaceably, if she stooped to smell a flower he plucked it, if she smiled at a thought he was on fire to know the thought; he was envious of the moments

when she was alone, though heaven knows she made the moments when he was with her insufferable,—and, while he adored her as his mistress, he distrusted her as his rival. "He watches me as a wild creature watches its prey," she thought. "Is it doubt, or love? Or is it more like a sort of madness than either!" But the truth was that he was full of an indefinable jealousy of herself!

In pursuance of his system, and because it gave him a proud pleasure,-pleasure whose other side was pain, he rode and drove with her, was sufficiently by her side at dinners, receptions and operas, took her everywhere she might desire to go: people who watched them could have seen only the customary absorption of the newlymarried; people who listened to them could have heard only the gently spoken commonplaces of two rather silent and highbred persons, who did not carry their hearts on their sleeves.

“Ordronnaux is infatuated," Harriman, who had been in the city, said to Alice on his return. "He loves with what you may call fatuity. It is certainly maladroit." "To give a woman the whip-hand so?" laughed Colonel Greve. "You women have been slaves so long, you make sad tyrants when you have the chance!"

"How disagreeable!" said Alice. "It provokes me to hear you talk so. There is no such thing as tyranny and fatuity in love." "Well, it is, at any rate," said Harriman," very uncomfortable for anybody who knows what a brilliant fellow Ordronnaux is, you never saw him, did you, Greve ?to meet him now.! He is so occupied furtively watching Emilia, listening to her, admiring her, under his mask of elegant passivity, that he appears-I shouldn't like to say, doltish-"

66

No, I should hope not !" cried Louise. "But tame and torpid," said Harriman, 'to the last degree. I hope he shines a little more in private or Emilia will think she has married nothing but a gold-stick in waiting!"

They were in a gallery of paintings one morning, Ordronnaux and Emilia, and had paused to look at a picture—a strange picture for them to look at together. "Two in the Campagna," was its name, and stray remembrances of the poem it illustrated flashed upon them both as they gazed at the vast champaign with its ruined tombs, its broken arches, its nebulous purples, the ghost of the great city far away, the two

And there was a bitter intensity in his tone that Emilia could not fail to understand, and of which she was still thinking,-for to her the poem bore a very different meaning, when he sauntered away to speak with some one in another portion of the gallery, and left her sitting there.

As she gazed at the picture, without seeing it now, a person at the other end of the sofa rose, and she glanced aside a tall, pale man with a rather heroic face, as seen in that swift half glimpse, and a knightly bearing despite his crutch,-evidently a soldier wounded in the war,-made her the very slightest inclination, a sort of irresistible tribute to the glance of such beautiful eyes, and went out. She looked after him absently, and, when her gaze returned, she

saw that he had left a white rose,- -a little white Scotch rose with which he had been trifling,-upon her open catalogue that lay on the sofa between them. She took up the catalogue, and the rose with it, unaware that Ordronnaux, in approaching, had seen approaching, had seen the whole, and she held it, quite sure it was no accident, half wondering, not wholly pleased, and yet somehow vaguely touched. She kept the rose when she took Ordronnaux' arm, partly for its sweetness, partly because she could not churlishly refuse so simple an offering, partly for the grain of sentiment dear to her who felt herself starved for it; he observed it in a glass upon her table by and by; and he was there in the evening when she moved in her slow grace, as she saw a full-blown petal drop, and took the rose and shut it in a book. "I like to come across a dead rose in a book," she said thoughtlessly to the caller who was present, she seldom spoke to Ordronnaux when she could help it, "I fancy some romance shut in with it there." The whole thing was simple enough; but Ordronnaux would not have staid in the city another night, and it was the next day that he took her home by a roundabout Canadian journey that consumed some weeks. The turf had long been green in the city squares, and the sunny slopes purple with violets; that embowered ancestral mansion of his among the hills, with all its flower-set lawns about it, would be putting on its loveliest look, and Ordronnaux wished Emilia to see it first when not one white rose, but a myriad, climbed around the windows!

"Emilia," he said, as they alighted at the porch, while the breath of the honeysuckles floated about them, and turned to look down the velvet swards, with their border of freshly green chestnut wood, to the great cliff whose wall rose between them and the lower earth, "this is your home. I wish," he said fervently, "I wish you may be happy here!"

"I thank you," she said.

It could not have been less to the merest stranger; she felt herself a liar in making it so much.

He led her through the apartments, quaint and low-browed with the old beams and panels of the ceilings, apartments enriched by the gleanings of the foreign travel of many generations of wealth the lovely drawing-rooms, where want of height was compensated by space and the immense crystal openings of the

windows that made them all sunshine, save where the shadows of leaves were dappling the white velvet carpets among their rose and azure hints and phantoms of flowers: there were marble sirens and sylphids shining among the pale silken curtains there, mellow landscapes now and then upon the walls, now and then a bronze beautiful as when some ancient dreamer. first saw its god stand dark against the sunny sky, an ebony escritoire, or easel, with its mosaic, throwing up the splendor here, an oriental trevet, a wonder of gilding and lacquer starting from the shadows there, silken divan and fauteuil and hassock of the same pale perfect tints as curtains and carpets, soft in shade as the fading clouds are, almost as pillowyrooms too brilliant and beautiful for Emilia's' moods. Nor did she like much better the dark library, with its cases carved from black and ancient teak, solid and heavy as the primeval rock, the desk upheld by a bent deity of Farther India with all his dragon-like folds and involutions, the table a huge black lotus itself; the whole place rather full of demoniacal suggestions of learning. There were other rooms no more to her fancy, for the translucent china and the ringing salvers had a covert insult to her excited sensitiveness; and the first exclamation of pleasure that she uttered was over a little parlor at the head of a flight of stairs. Everything seemed to be quite a hundred years old there; the once vermilion velvets of the hangings and the unique upholstery had faded now to a silver grey, with a mere dream of the rose left upon them, a sort of frosty hoariness over all; through the single window, a long balconied window, the sunlit steeps of a distant mountain hung its valleys in mid-air, a magnificent picture full of magical moods and changes. There was but one othera portrait, hanging opposite the window, of a dark and pale lady.

"Do you like, the room," asked Ordron

naux.

"It is very lovely," said Emilia.

"Make it your sitting-room," he replied. then, "where you are never to be disturbed. It opens from your dressing-room, you see; my own rooms are on the other side." And then he led her to the portrait. "It is my mother," he said, as they stood before it. And, in spite of all contradictory feeling, there was something exquisitely pathetic to Emilia in the moment; she pitied Ordronnaux and his dead

mother as she did herself, and the tears dazzled her an instant.

It was one of those well-painted portraits whose eyes follow you. Emilia had not noticed it before. As she looked at it now she could not hinder a sense of guilt, -those eyes were capable of reading her soul; and it was not so she should have met her husband's mother. It seemed all at once impossible to live with those eyes pursuing her; calm, clear eyes-presently they would be avenging eyes.

"If she were but alive! Ordronnaux said. "She would have loved you well." Emilia was only thankful she was dead. And so it happened that in all the oldfashioned house, there was not a single room whose atmosphere Emilia could assimilate with that of her own interior life, and the whole place was only a beautiful prison, a prison that she loathed the first day she crossed its threshold-loathed it because it was her place of bondage, loathed it because all the old Ordronnaux that had once made a part of it seemed to rise in every room and to rebuke her.

There were not many neighbors, nor were those very congenial-a few wealthy families who of late years came for the summer scenery, and had bought some acres from the small farmers; the Ordronnaux owned mountain and forest for miles, still in the original grant which dated back nearly to the days of Captain John Mason. When the first visits were received, and one or two stupid tea-parties given and returned, the social intercourse was almost at an end. The domestic machinery was so perfect that where Emilia was, no murmur of it came. In the long bright mornings, the birds, the bees, the wind in the leaves, made all the sound there was. Ordronnaux was away, perhaps, riding about the farm, whither she had declined to ride with him, selecting the timber that needed felling in the woods, or else writing and reading in the library; and Emilia was very lonely. In the evenings they sat together, as she felt necessary in her sacrifice to outward decency, for they had an unspoken compact of civility-he with his newspapers, she with her fancy-work or book. At first Ordronnaux read aloud whatever was of interest; but Emilia's absent air of revery was often what no gentleman could break in upon; and save the few simple phrases uttered now and then there would be no sound the evening through but the plaintive moaning of the Æolian harp she had strung

in a hall-window, and which nearly drove Ordronnaux wild. Thus the loneliness became something palpable, and out of its intense isolation Emilia divined that she was to be starved into love—and all the rebel in her rose. She knew that she was wrong; she felt herself wicked; the feeling only made her more so. In some inexplicable way she nursed an increasing rancor towards Ordronnaux-to think that the place might have been so dear to her, that the morning rides in the green sun and shadow of the woods might have been so pleasant, the long evenings together might have been so rapturous, his gifts so precious, if she had but loved her husband! That she did not, she held to be his fault, not hers. "He has work before him, if he means to break me in!" she said, and quite aware that she did it viciously, she laid out for herself a course of study that should make the days fly-but it did not. "At any rate," she said, "it will keep me from losing my reason."

Going on with her work of hating Ordronnaux, for indifference towards a lover must needs harden to harshness towards a jailer, Emilia took, of course, no pains to preserve his admiration. She put on the simple garments of the wardrobe she had at her marriage; she knotted her long hair in the easiest fashion. Yet, though Ordronnaux, remembering women in resplendent toilets, might wish Emilia would array herself in the brightness that belonged to the Ordronnaux ladies-through it all he could think only of a goddess in disguise, for she could not change the silver-sweet tones of her voice, she could not change the warmth of carnation on her cheek, the depth of the violet in her eye, and every movement, every outline was only flowing grace.

As for Ordronnaux, the loneliness reacted on him corrosively. Though he loved his home, and had been full of his object of winning her in it, yet he had been accustomed to having his friends about him here, and wide-hearthed hospitality had been the order of the day; now to sit before the statue of a martyr for hours was fast getting to be an ordeal. It was not, however, that mere material loneliness of Emilia's that he felt,-and from which, in some unwhispered way, she yet unconsciously looked for escape,-it was the loneliness of the inner soul. He was losing confidence, and his days and his nights were a keen misery. With all his passion he could not choke back a subtle, acrimo