to raise her. It was useless: she steadily

resisted me.

'Does this mean No?' I asked.

'It means,' she said, in faint broken tones, 'that I prize your honour beyond my happiness. If I marry you, your career is destroyed by your wife-and the day will come when you will tell me so. I can suffer-I can die-but I can not face such a prospect as that. Forgive me, and forget me. I can say no more!"

She let go of my hand, and sank on the floor. The utter despair of that action told me, far more eloquently than the words which she had just spoken, that her resolution was immovable. She had deliberately separated herself from me; her own act had parted us for ever.

CHAPTER XX.

THE TWO DESTINIES.

I MADE no movement to leave the room; I let no sign of sorrow escape me. My heart was hardened against the woman who had so obstinately rejected me. I stood looking down at her with a merciless anger, the bare remembrance of which fills me at this day with a horror of myself. There is but one excuse for me. The shock of that last overthrow of the only hope that held me to life was more than my reason could endure. On that dreadful night (whatever I may have been at other times), I myself believe it-I was a maddened man.

I was the first to break the silence.

'Get up,' I said coldly.

She lifted her face from the floor, and looked at me doubting whether she had heard aright.

Put on your hat and cloak,' I resumed. 'I must ask you to go back with me as far as the boat.'

She rose slowly. Her eyes rested on my face with a dull bewildered look.

'Why am I to go with you to the boat?' she asked.

The child heard her. The child ran up to us with her little hat in one hand, and the key of the cabin in the other.

'I'm ready!' she said.

cabin door.'

'I will open the

Her mother signed to her to go back to the bedchamber. She went back as far as the door which led into the courtyard, and

waited there listening. I turned coldly to

Mrs. Van Brandt, and answered the question which she had addressed to me.

'You are left,' I said, 'without the means of getting away from this place. In two hours more, the tide will be in my favour, and I shall sail at once on the return voyage. We part, this time, never to meet again. Before I go, I am resolved to leave you properly provided for. My money is in my travelling-bag in the cabin. For that reason, I am obliged to ask you to go with me as far as the boat.'

'I thank you gratefully for your kindness,' she said. 'I don't stand in such serious need of help as you suppose.'

'It is useless to attempt to deceive me,' I proceeded. I have spoken with the headpartner of the house of Van Brandt, at Amsterdam; and I know exactly what your position is. Your pride must bend low enough to take from my hands the means of

subsistence for yourself and your child. If I had died in England

I stopped. The unexpressed idea in my mind was to tell her that she would inherit

a legacy under my Will, and that she might quite as becomingly take money from me in my lifetime as take it from my executors after my death. In forming this thought into words, the associations which it called naturally into being, revived in me the memory of my contemplated suicide in the lake. Mingling with the remembrances thus aroused, there rose in me, unbidden, a Temptation so unutterably vile, and yet so irresistible in the state of my mind at the moment, that it shook me to the soul. You have nothing to live for, now that she has refused to be yours,' the fiend in me whispered. Take your leap into the next world and make the woman whom you love take it with you!' While I was still

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