Still he says nothing:  still I feel, though I am not looking at him, that his eyes are upon me.

“Was it—­” say I, unable any longer to bear that dumb gaze, and preferring to take the bull by the horns, and rush on my fate—­“was it any thing about me? has she been telling you any tales of—­of—­me?”

No answer!  No sound but the clock, and Vick’s heavy breathing, as she peacefully snores on the footstool.  I cannot bear the suspense.  Again I lift my eyes, and look at him.  Yes, I am right! the intense anxiety—­ the overpowering emotion on his face tell me that I have touched the right string.

“Are there—­are there—­are you aware that there are any tales that she could tell of you?”

Again I laugh harshly.

“Ha! ha! if we came to mutual anecdotes, I am not quite sure that I might not have the best of it!”

“That is not the question,” he replies, in a voice so exceedingly stern, so absolutely different from any thing I have ever hitherto contemplated as possible in my gentle, genial Roger, that again, to the depths of my soul, I quail; how could I ever, in wildest dreams, have thought I should dare to tell him?—­“it is nothing to me what tales you can tell of her!—­she is not my wife!—­what I wish to know—­what I will know, is, whether there is any thing that she could say of you!”

For a moment, I do not answer.  I cannot.  A coward fear is grasping my heart with its clammy hands.  Then—­

“Could!” say I, shrugging my shoulders, and feebly trying to laugh derisively; “of course she could! it would be difficult to set a limit to the powers of a lady of her imagination!”

“What do you mean?” he cries, quickly, and with what sounds like a sort of hope in his voice; “have you any reason—­any grounds for thinking her inventive?”

I do not answer directly.

“It is true, then,” I cry, with flashing eyes, and in a voice of great and indignant anguish.  “I have not been mistaken!  I was right!  Is it possible that you, who, only this morning, warned me with such severity against backbiting, have been calmly listening to scandalous tales about me from a stranger?”

He does not interrupt me:  he is listening eagerly, and that sort of hope is still in his face.

“I knew it would come, sooner or later,” I continue, speaking excitedly, and with intense bitterness, “sooner or later, I knew that it would be a case of Algy over again! but I did not—­did not think that it would have been quite so soon!  Great Heaven!” (smiting my hands sharply together, and looking upward), “I have fallen low! to think that I should come to be discussed by you with her!”