respect for my desires."

wife and in attention to what she

"I am to understand then, that I am not to ring the bell, here in my own home, nor ask the servant to even bring me a glass of water without your permission?" said Stella, she too speaking quietly so far as manner went, but her heart within on fire.

"Not in my presence," answered Hortensia. "I am the mistress, and I must be treated as the mistress."

"And as for calling you Mrs. Branscombeyes, I will, with pleasure," Stella went on to say, her colour rising, her eyes darkening, her voice deepening. "I would call you anything, Hortensia, that should best express the unfathomable gulf there is between us and the infinite wrong that you have done me!"

"Precious Prince, protect me!" cried Hortensia, flinging herself into her husband's arms and bursting into tears. "Now you see what I have to endure!" she added, sobbing.

"Stella, apologize to my wife," said Mr. Branscombe sternly.

"Never!" said Stella, rising and facing her father. "It is she who has done me the wrong, not I who have injured her. I will not apologize, papa!"

"Then leave the room," said Mr. Branscombe, whom the tears of his Little Love distressed as much as his former Star's wicked temper and contumacy annoyed. "Leave the room, and do not let me see your face again till you have come to a better frame of mind, and can recognize both your blessings and your superiors."

So down with a crash went another cardboard Temple of Love; and the warrant of poor Stella's disinheritance from her father's affection was finally and definitely signed.

CHAPTER XVI.

AT THE BREAKFAST TABLE.

THE next morning, when Randolph came up to Rose Hill as usual, he saw that something had happened to gravely disturb Stella-Stella, always his radiant Star, how much soever she might have paled for others.

The excitement of the foregoing night was still upon the faithful soul for whom Mr. Branscombe, as Prospero, could find no simile so exact as that of Caliban. He felt as if he bore in visible characters about him the words of his great desire, his fervent thought, and, by dint of desiring and thinking, his fragant hope. As he walked along the road that led to Rose Hill, he felt as if he were coming to the term of his present career and to the opening of a new life. But when he saw Stella's face, pale and mournful as in the days when love had been at war with duty and Cyril's was the one name to

which she dare not give utterance, then his heart died within him; and yet it did not die. Only himself and all his own great hope and yearning sank into the background, and how he could best make her happy was the guardian sentinel of all the rest.

"What is the matter, dearest Stella ?" he said, as he took both her hands in his, in his deep love and faithful sympathy forgetting to be formal and conventional.

"Randolph, I am just broken-hearted," she said. "You must help me; you must tell me what I am to do. I am too wretched as things are-it is impossible to go on like this; but I am bewildered, and do not know where to turn for help."

"I am glad you have come to me. What is it?" he said again, simply but earnestly.

How his heart beat! Why did she leave her hands in his? Did she feel the spirit that ran through his blood, as a song not yet born into sound flows in unspoken melody through the brain?

"I will tell you, and then you can judge,” she answered--poor miserable Stella! with her somewhat prosaic sorrows created by feminine jealousy and girlish littleness as her answer to his poetic exaltation, his divine fire!

And on this she told him of what had happened last night after he had left; of the coldness like death existing between her and her father; of how Hortensia had come between them so that things would never be right again; and of how it was impossible for her, Stella, to remain at home in the false and humiliating position to which her young stepmother had doomed her.

"You cannot stay," said Randolph in a low voice. "You must leave, Stella, for your own

sake, your own self-respect."

"I know I must," she answered; "but where can I go? What can I do? It would be such an affront to papa if I went out as a companion or a governess! And I could not live with any one here. When I go I must go quite away.' "You must," echoed Randolph — away."

66

quite

All this time he had been holding her hands in his, she scarcely knowing that he was doing so, but only conscious of a certain sense of friendly sympathy and protection, of a certain tender brotherliness which made the sadness of the moment less intolerable.

"Stella," he then said, his voice low and sweet as a song, his face transformed from its usual clumsy goodness and doglike devotion