engages them. I want to talk to that girl."

It was astonishing how agreeable she made herself to her victims when she had fairly entrapped them. Bertha hesitated a little before accepting her offer of a seat at her side, but once seated she found herself oddly amused. When Madame de Castro chose to rake the embers of her seventy years, many a lively coal discovered itself among the ashes.

Seeing the two women together, Edmondstone shuddered in fastidious protest.

"How could you laugh at that detestable old woman?" he exclaimed on encountering Bertha later in the evening. "I wonder that M. Villefort would permit her to talk to you. She is a wicked, cynical creature, who has the hardihood to laugh at her sins instead of repenting of them."

"Perhaps that is the reason she is so amusing," said Bertha.

Edmondstone answered her with gentle mournfulness.

"What!" he said. "Have you begun to say such things? You too, Bertha"—

The laugh with which she stopped him was both light and hard.

"Where is M. Villefort?" she asked. "I have actually not seen him for fifteen minutes. Is it possible that Madame de Castro has fascinated him into forgetting me?"

Edmondstone went to his hotel that night in a melancholy mood. He even lay awake to think what a dreary mistake his cousin's marriage was. She had been such a tender and easily swayed little soul as a girl, and now it really seemed as if she was hardening into a woman of the world. In the old times he had been wont to try his sonnets upon Bertha as a musician tries his chords upon his most delicate instrument. Even now he remembered certain fine, sensitive expressions of hers which had thrilled him beyond measure.

"How could she marry such a fellow as that—how could she?" he groaned. "What does it mean? It must mean something."

He was pale and heavy-eyed when he wandered round to the Villeforts' the following morning. M. Villefort was sitting with Bertha and reading aloud. He stopped to receive their visitor punctiliously and inquire after his health.

"M. Edmondstone cannot have slept well," he remarked.

"I did not sleep at all," Edmondstone answered, "and naturally have a headache."

Bertha pointed to a wide lounge of the pouf order.

"Then go to sleep now," she said; "M. Villefort will read. When I have a headache he often reads me to sleep, and I am always better on awaking."

Involuntarily Edmondstone half frowned. Absurdly enough, he resented in secret this amiability on the part of M. Villefort toward his own wife. He was quite prepared to be severe upon the reading, but was surprised to be compelled to acknowledge that M. Villefort read wondrously well, and positively with hints of delicate perception. His voice was full and yet subtly flexible. Edmondstone tried to protest against this also, but uselessly. Finally he was soothed, and from being fretfully wide-awake suddenly passed into sleep as Bertha had commanded. How long his slumber lasted he could not have told. All at once he found himself aroused and wide-awake as ever. His headache had departed; his every sense seemed to have gained keenness. M. Villefort's voice had ceased, and for a few seconds utter, dead silence reigned. Then he heard the fire crackling, and shortly afterward a strange, startling sound—a sharp, gasping sob!

The pang which seized upon him was strong indeed. In one moment he seemed to learn a thousand things by intuition—to comprehend her, himself, the past. Before he moved he knew that Villefort was not in the room, and he had caught a side glimpse of the pretty blue of Bertha's dress.

But he had not imagined the face he saw when he turned his head to look at her. She sat in a rigid attitude, leaning against the high cushioned back of her chair, her hands clasped above her head. She stared at the fire with eyes wide and strained with the agony of tears unshed, and amid the rush of all other emotions he was peculiarly conscious of being touched by the minor one of his recognition of her look of extreme youth—the look which had been wont to touch people in the girl, Bertha Trent. He had meant to speak clearly, but his voice was only a loud whisper when he sprang up, uttering her name.

"Bertha! Bertha! Bertha!" as he flung himself upon his knees at her side.

Her answer was an actual cry, and yet it reached no higher pitch than his own intense whisper.

"I thought you were asleep?"

Her hands fell and he caught them. His sad impassioned face bowed itself upon her palms.

"I am awake, Bertha," he groaned. "I am awake—at last."

She regarded him with a piteous, pitying glance. She knew him with a keener, sadder knowledge than he would ever comprehend; but she did not under-estimate the depth of his misery at this one overwhelming moment. He was awake indeed and saw what he had lost.

"If you could but have borne with me a little longer," he said. "If I had only not been so shallow and so blind. If you could but have borne with me a little longer!"

"If I could but have borne with myself a little longer," she answered. "If I could but have borne a little longer with my poor, base pride! Because I suffered myself, I have made another suffer too."

He knew she spoke of M. Villefort, and the thought jarred upon him.

"He does not suffer," he said. "He is not of the fibre to feel pain."

And he wondered why she shrank from him a little and answered with a sad bitterness:—

"Are you sure? You did not know that!"—

"Forgive me," he said brokenly, the face he lifted, haggard with his unhappiness. "Forgive me, for I have lost so much."

She wasted few words and no tears. The force and suddenness of his emotion and her own had overborne her into this strange unmeant confession; but her mood was unlike his,—it was merely receptive. She listened to his unavailing regrets, but told him little of her own past.

"It does not matter," she said drearily. "It is all over. Let it rest. The pain of to-day and tomorrow is enough for us. We have borne yesterday; why should we want it back again?"

And when they parted she said only one thing of the future:—

"There is no need that we should talk. There is nothing for us beyond this point. We can only go back. We must try to forget—and be satisfied with our absinthe."

Instead of returning to his hotel, Edmondstone found his way to the Champs Élysées, and finally to the Bois. He was too wretched to have any purpose in his wanderings. He walked rapidly, looking straight before him and seeing nobody. He scarcely understood his own fierce emotions Hitherto his fancies had brought him a vague rapture; now he experienced absolute anguish, Every past experience had become trivial. What happiness is so keen as one's briefest pain? As he walked he lived again the days he had thrown away. He remembered a thousand old, yet new, phases of Bertha's girlhood. He thought of times when she had touched or irritated or pleased him. When he had left Paris for Rome she had not bidden him good-by. Jenny, her younger sister, had told him that she was not well.

"If I had seen her then," he cried inwardly, "I might have read her heart—and my own."

M. Renard, riding a very tall horse in the Bois, passed him and raised his eyebrows at the sight of his pallor and his fagged yet excited look.

"There will be a new sonnet," he said to himself. "A sonnet to Despair, or Melancholy, or Loss."

Afterward, when society became a little restive and eager, M. Renard looked on with sardonic interest.

"That happy man, M. Villefort," he said to Madame de Castro, "is a good soul—a good soul. He has no small jealous follies," and his smile was scarcely a pleasant thing to see.

"There is nothing for us beyond this past," Bertha had said, and Edmondstone had agreed with her hopelessly.

But he could not quite break away. Sometimes for a week the Villeforts missed him, and then again they saw him every day. He spent his mornings