“You have said enough, Juanita,” he replied, with concentrated passion.  “This is too much to bear, even from you, from whom I have already endured so much.  You know you do not believe it.”

“I do believe it,” was my firm reply.  It was false, but what did I care?  It served my purpose.

“I might bid you remember,” he said, “how I urged you to be mine when my prospects had grown brighter, and you were poor as before.  I might appeal to the manner in which my suit has been urged for years, as a proof of my innocence of this charge that you have brought against me.  But I disdain to plead my cause with so unwomanly a heart,—­that measures the baseness of others by what it knows of its own.”

He went, and for a time I was left in doubt whether my victory had been really achieved.  Then I thought it all over, and was reassured.  He could not simulate those looks and tones,—­no, nor that tumult of feeling which had made his heart throb so wildly beneath my hand.  He loved me,—­that was certain; and no matter how great his anger or his indignation, my refusal must have cut him to the soul.  And the charge I had made would rankle, too.  These thoughts were my comfort when John told me, with grief and surprise, that his brother had joined the Arctic expedition under Dr. Kane.  I knew it was for no light cause he would forsake the career just opening so brightly before him.

John and I were married in December, as had been our intention.  We led a quiet, but to him a happy, life.  He often wondered at my content with home and its seclusion, and owned what fears he had felt, before our marriage, lest I, accustomed to gayety and excitement, should weary of him, the thoughtful, book-loving man.  It seemed he had made up his mind to all manner of self-sacrifice in the way of accompanying me to parties, and having guests at our own house.  I did not exact much from him; I cared little for the gay world in which William no longer moved.  I read with John his favorite books; I interested myself in the sciences which he pursued with such enthusiasm.  It was no part of my plan to inflict unnecessary misery on any one, and I strove with all my power to make happy the man whom I had chosen.  I succeeded fully; and when we sat on the piazza in the moonlight, my head resting on his shoulder, my hand clasped in his, he would tell me how infinitely dearer the wife had grown to be than even the lover’s fancy had portrayed her.

And my thoughts were far away from the bland airs and brightening moon amid the frozen solitudes of the North.  Where was William? what was he doing? did he think of me? and how?  What if he should perish there, and we should never meet again?  Life grew blank at the thought; I put it resolutely away.