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458 ripples all over her shoulders and the counterpane like a shower of molten gold.

"If I were dead you would forgive me, would you not?"

"I would try to."

"If you knew that I could not live very long, you would forgive me?"

"Perhaps."

"Then say so now," she says feverishly, with her hands clasped over her labouring heart, "that you do forgive me."

"I cannot," I say slowly; "it is all too sudden I do not forgive you; would you have me tell a lie? And you seem to have forgotten all that was between us how can there be any shadow of friendship between us?"

"I don't ask for friendship," she says, falling back upon the pillows.

How pale and lost and lovely she looks! No wonder Paul found it in his heart to pity her just now.

"Do you know," she says, opening her eyes, "that it is you who should ask forgiveness of me, not I of you? Paul was mine first, do not forget that, and he might have been mine again, if you had not bewitched him; if I stole him from you last, you stole him from me first. How did you make him love you so well?" she cries, with a low wail: "whether with you or away from you, it was always the same—you were the very apple of his eye. Men are not usually so faithful to the absent, or so cold to a beautiful woman who loves them. And all these years that I have been his wife, he has never spoken one word to me, save before servants—never touched my hand in commonest friendly greeting. I came behind him once and put my arms round his neck; he started up—you should have seen his face, there was murder in it; he left me without a word—and for all of this, I have to thank you, Helen Adair! Oh! it is pleasant to steal into his room, like a thief in