“And I loved her so!” said the young girl, mournfully.  “Husband, I will not reproach you—­your love was chivalrous and noble; but why did you not let me speak freely to you?  I declared to you that no doubt ever crossed my mind.  I thought you knew all, though I considered it strange that you, so proud of your noble birth, should wish to marry me.  I never imagined that you had been deceived.  The duchess told me that you knew the whole history of my father’s crime, that you were familiar with every detail of it, but that you wished me never to mention it—­never even ever so remotely to allude to it.  I thought it strange, Norman, that one in your position should be willing to overlook so terrible a blot; but she told me your love for me was so great that you could not live without me.  She told me even more—­that I must try to make my own life so perfect that the truest nobility of all, the nobility of virtue, might be mine.”

“Did she really tell you that?” asked Lord Arleigh wonderingly.

“Yes; and, Norman, she said that you would discuss the question with me once, and once only—­that would be on my wedding-day.  On that day you would ask for and I should tell the whole history of my father’s crime; and after that it was to be a dead-letter, never to be named between us.”

“And you believed her?” he said.

“Yes, as I believe you.  Why should I have doubted her?  My faith in her was implicit.  Why should I have even thought you would repent?  More than once I was on the point of running away.  But she would not let me go.  She said that I must not be cruel to you—­that you loved me so dearly that to lose me would prove a death-blow.  So I believed her, and, against my will, staid on.”

“I wish you had told me this,” he said, slowly.

She raised her eyes to his.

“You would not let me speak, Norman.  I tried so often, dear, but you would not let me.”

“I remember,” he acknowledged; “but, oh, my darling, how little I knew what you had to say!  I never thought that anything stood between us except your poverty.”

They remained silent for a few minutes—­such sorrow as theirs needed no words.  Lord Arleigh was again the first to speak.

“Madaline,” he said, “will you tell me all you remember of your life.”

“Yes; it is not much.  It has been such a simple life, Norman, half made up of shadows.  First, I can remember being a child in some far off woodland house.  I am sure it was in the woods; for I remember the nuts growing on the trees, the squirrels, and the brown hares.  I remember great masses of green foliage, a running brook, and the music of wild birds.  I remember small latticed windows against which the ivy tapped.  My father used to come in with his gun slung across his shoulders—­he was a very handsome man, Norman, but not kind to either my mother or me.  My mother was then, as she is now, patient, kind, gentle, long-suffering.  I