Page:Lippincotts Monthly Magazine-40.djvu/563

Rh home late, to find Juliet lying on the bed, asleep, but moaning. She still had on her evening dress of some creamy gauze, and her pearls were around her throat. He stood and looked at her, and when she again sobbed he awoke her.

She got up and sat on the side of the bed, and looked at him with tears in her dark, soft eyes, and he put his arm around her, and drew her to him, and the two walked up and down the room in silence, but every little while she shivered, and he knew she was gently crying. So at last he thought it unwise and foolish to any longer ignore her trouble, but, as will happen when we speak under the pressure of feeling and on impulse, he said the last thing he meant to say, and what she did not expect to hear. He said,—

"Will you be contented if you know that Janet is happy?—that she will marry Duncan Macfarlane?"

"That is impossible," replied Juliet. "Janet will never marry. "

"She will do everything that one does not expect of her! Surely, Juliet, if she chooses her own path, and if she wins as good and upright a husband as Duncan, and a great fortune also, you ought not to worry until you make yourself ill and me perfectly miserable. It is affection thrown away."

"How do you know all this?"

"Duncan wrote to me. He is perfectly infatuated."

Then she asked him for the letter, and he refused to give it to her, and neither did he tell her that it was one long message to her. He took the man's right to judge for the woman, and he told her only that I was in St. Louis, that I had been ill, and that, for some reason, I had not yet received the money for which I had intrigued. But he did say that as soon as I had recovered I would, no doubt, marry Duncan. He did not add that he understood from Duncan's letter that I refused to marry until I was reconciled to Juliet. He did not think I had a right to have so preposterous a demand considered.

To what he told her, Juliet made no reply, but at last she said, aloud, though to herself,—

"How could she help but be ill! Night and day she cries to me, and I do not answer her!" Then she looked up at Bernard: "What do you suppose she has been doing these interminable months?"

"Repenting, I hope." Then he added, "If Duncan can overlook her conduct, and she can make restitution, she ought to thank heaven for its mercy. But, since he wrote that she hesitates about marrying, I have had a little hope about her. I respect her for her reluctance to disgrace an honest name."

"Duncan Macfarlane's name?" said she.

"It is a good name. The name is honorable."

"Oh, Bernard," cried Juliet, wrenching herself from his arms, and facing him, "say no more! If you talk of disgrace, of shame, of deceit, talk not of Janet! Duncan need have no fear of his name! It is yours that is disgraced, not his!"

Bernard looked at her in dismay. He thought that worry had turned her brain: he could not understand the meaning of her face or her words.