for me of a sudden in this way, and that the temptation to be free of the life she hated was very strong. But I didn't think of all this, and when she said 'Yes'-I tell you I was a fool. It wasn't so much her fault; I might have told she didn't love me. She had only loved one man, and he was married; his wife died, and he asked her to marry him. She never told me of him or of her story: there was no blame in that, but she might have trusted me more. As it was, she played with me through sheer timidity; for he could not marry at once, and she kept putting off, as I thought, our marriage, till one day I had a letter, telling me all, and saying she had been married to him the day before."

"She must have been a bad lot," was Roland's not unnatural comment.

"That's what I tried to console myself

with," said Max, with a half laugh; “but it wouldn't do. She was modest and sweet-tempered and affectionate all that was real; but she had no courage and no truth. Poor girl! The man she married turned out a scamp and a beast. She left him, went back to her old profession, and --she has got used to it."

Six months ago his words would have been bitterer, but now the thought of Evelyn Goring softened them, and he could think more kindly of the woman who had wronged him, with a wrong which had been a far deeper and more enduring pain than he had let show in his words.

"So I went back to my work," he said, after a while; "and that's the beginning

and end of my love story, Roley. You'd better forget it in your own.

I'm glad you are happy, old boy, and I think your

wife will be the same."

Othello.

CHAPTER XII.

If it were now to die,

'Twere now to be most happy; for I fear
My soul hath her content so absolute,
That not another comfort like to this
Succeeds in unknown fate.

Desdemona.

The heavens forbid

But that our loves and comforts should increase,
Even as our days do grow.

Othello, Act ii. Scene 1.

It was universally agreed by the guests who were gathered together at Vaneholm, to honour Gertrude Anley's marriage, that it "went off very well." The bride looked beautiful in her lily-like garb, and those of the villagers and farmers round Vaneholm, who were allowed to see the

show, expressed the opinions of their social superiors when they said that "a handsomer couple never stepped."

Indeed Roland Trench and she whom he had taken to be his wife were worth looking at, as they stood together in symbol of the oneness which should link them to one another from henceforth. Roland, tall, and with a strange fervid beauty of great joy in his face, as he took the hand of the girl by him, looking very queenly and beautiful in her white robes, with the light catching the curves of her bright hair.

Yet some might have turned from her, to look at one of the girls who stood in a cluster behind her. Evelyn Evelyn was by no means the prettiest of the bridesmaids, but there was something about her which marked her apart from them, an utter lack

of self-consciousness, a quiet yet most

sweet grace of earnest simplicity, as she stood with her hands clasped, her head a little bent. So still she kept, while she heard the words from Roland's lips, which made it a sin for her to think of him again, as she had done till now.

That was the worst. If she might still have kept her love for him, as a secret treasure for her own sad joy, she felt that she could have borne it better; but she knew well that there was but one right thing for her to do, and that was to crush this feeling and fling it out of her heart. And how could she, when it had so clung and interwoven itself about her, so as to be part of her being? She could not—all at once she did not know how to do so; she could not guess when the fight she must wage with herself should have an end. All she could do as yet was to say to herself, "I hope he will be happy; I do