I had no wish either to mortify or wound the man I had loved so tenderly, but from whom I felt now wholly severed, as though the shadow of a grave had intervened between us.

Never again, never, could he be more to me than a memory, a regret.

Glaring faults, impulsive offenses, crime even it may be, I could have forgiven, so long as his allegiance had been mine, and his affection proof against change, but coldness, perfidy, loathing, such as he had avowed, these could never be redeemed in any way, nor considered other than they were, insuperable objections to our honorable union.

My heart recoiled from him so utterly, that I could conceive of no fate more bitter than to be compelled again to receive his profession of affection, his lover-like caresses; yet, in recoiling, it had been bruised against its prison-bars, bruised and crushed like a bird that seeks refuge in the farthest limits of its cage from an approaching foe, and suffers almost as severely as if given to its fangs.

I determined, after mature consideration, to see him once again, privately, and beyond the range of all foreign observation and hearing.  In order to do this, I might have to wait, and in the mean time how should I deport myself, how conceal my change of feeling from his observant eyes?

I was relieved by an unlooked-for contingency.  Evelyn announced her intention of going, as soon as I should be able to spare her, with a party of young friends, to hear a celebrated singer perform in an oratorio in the cathedral of an adjacent city, her specialty being vocal music, and her mourning permitting only sacred concerts.  Her own highly-cultivated voice, it is true, had ill repaid the care that had been lavished on it, sharp and thin as it was by nature.  I urged her to set forth at once, declaring myself convalescent, but I did not leave my room, nor see Claude Bainrothe, save for five minutes in her presence, until after she had gone.  Then I was at liberty to work my will.

I wrote on the very evening of her departure, requesting him to defer his accustomed visit, until the next morning, when I hoped to have an hour’s private conversation with him in the library, a room most dear to me, once as the chosen haunt of my father, but shunned of late as vault-like and melancholy, now that his ever-welcome and dear presence was removed from it forever.

Punctual as the hand to the hour or the dial to the sun, Claude Bainrothe came at the time I had appointed, and I was there to meet him, nerved and calm as a spirit of the past, in that great quiet sarcophagus of books—­at least, I so deceived myself to believe.  I had made up my mind, during the time I had been sitting alone in that sombre room, as to what I would say to him, and how clearly and concisely I would array my wrongs in words, and pronounce his sentence.  But, when he came, all this was forgotten.  A tumult of wild feeling surged through my brain.  My very tongue grew icy, and trembled in my mouth.  My eyes were dimmed, and my forehead was cold and rigid.  I was silent from emotion.  I felt like a dying wretch.