I had drunk of the cup of vengeance; it was sweet, but did not satisfy.  I longed for a fuller draught; but might it not be denied to my fevered lips?  Perhaps, amid the noble and disinterested toils of the expedition, his heart would outgrow all love for me, and when we met again I should see my power was gone.  I pondered much on this; I believed at last that the solitude, the isolation, would be not unpropitious to me.  From the little world of the ice-locked vessel his thoughts would turn to the greater world he had left, and I should be remembered.  When he returned we should be much together.  His mother was dead; our house was the only place he could call his home.  Not even for me, I felt assured, would he cast off the love of his only brother.  I had not done with him yet.  So quietly and composedly I awaited his return.

He came at last, and his manner when we met smote me with a strange uneasiness.  It was not the estrangement of a friend whom I had injured, but the distant politeness of a stranger.  Was my influence gone?  I determined to know, once for all.  When we chanced to be alone a moment I went to his side.  “William,” I asked, laying my hand on his arm, and speaking in a tender, reproachful tone, “why do you treat me so?”

With a quick, decided motion, he removed my hand,—­then looked down on me with a smile. “‘You are strangely obtuse,’” he said, quoting my own words of two years before.  “What can Mrs. Haughton desire from a base fortune-hunter with whom she is unhappily connected by marriage, but a humility that does not presume on the relationship?”

I saw a bold stroke was needed, and that I must stoop to conquer.  “Oh, William,” I said, sorrowfully, “you called me vindictive once, but it is you who are really so.  I was unhappy, harassed, distracted between”——­

“Between what?”

“I do not know—­I mean I cannot tell you,” I stammered, with well-feigned confusion.  “Can you not forgive me, William?  Often and often, since you left me that day, I have wished to see you, and to tell you how I repented my hasty and ungenerous words.  Will you not pardon me?  Shall we not be friends again?”

“I am not vindictive,” he said, more kindly,—­“least of all toward you.  But I cannot see how you should desire the friendship of one whom you regard as a mercenary hypocrite.  When you can truthfully assure me that you disbelieve that charge, then, and not till then, will I forgive you and be your friend.”

“Let it be now, then,” I said, joyfully, holding out my hand.  He did not reject it;—­we were reconciled.

William had come home ill; the hardships of the expedition and the fearful cold of the Arctic Zone had been too much for him.  The very night of his return I noticed in his countenance a frequent flush succeeded by a deadly pallor; my quick ear had caught, too, the sound of a cough,—­not frequent or prolonged, but deep and hollow.  And now, for the first time in my long and dreary toil, I saw the path clear and the end in view.