“You are talking nonsense, dear Martin!” she gasped; “you ought not!  I am not very strong.  Get me a glass of water.”

I fetched a glass of water from the kitchen; for the servant, who had been at work, had gone home, and we were quite alone in the house.  When I returned, her face was still working with nervous twitchings.

“Martin, you ought not!” she repeated, after she had swallowed some water.  “Tell me it is a joke directly.”

“I cannot,” I replied, painfully and sorrowfully; “it is the truth, though I would almost rather face death than own it.  I love you dearly, Julia; but I love another woman better.  God help us both!”

There was dead silence in the room after those words.  I could not hear Julia breathe or move, and I could not look at her.  My eyes were turned toward the window and the islands across the sea, purple and hazy in the distance.

“Leave me!” she said, after a very long stillness; “go away, Martin.”

“I cannot leave you alone,” I exclaimed; “no, I will not, Julia.  Let me tell you more; let me explain it all.  You ought to know every thing now.”

“Go away!” she repeated, in a slow, mechanical tone.

I hesitated still, seeing her white and trembling, with her eyes glassy and fixed.  But she motioned me from her toward the door, and her pale lips parted again to reiterate her command.

How I crossed that room I do not know; but the moment after I had closed the door I heard the key turn in the lock.  I dared not quit the house and leave her alone in such a state; and I longed ardently to hear the clocks chime five, and the sound of Johanna’s wheels on the roughly-paved street.  She could not be here yet for a full half-hour, for she had to go up to our house in the Grange Road and come back again.  What if Julia should have fainted, or be dead!

That was one of the longest half-hours in my life.  I stood at the street-door watching and waiting, and nodding to people who passed by, and who simpered at me in the most inane fashion.

“The fools!” I called them to myself.  At length Johanna turned the corner, and her pony-carriage came rattling cheerfully over the large round stones.  I ran to meet her.

“For Heaven’s sake, go to Julia!” I cried.  “I have told her.”

“And what does she say?” asked Johanna.

“Not a word, not a syllable,” I replied, “except to bid me go away.  She has locked herself into the drawing-room.”

“Then you had better go away altogether,” she said, “and leave me to deal with her.  Don’t come in, and then I can say you are not here.”

A friend of mine lived in the opposite house, and, though I knew he was not at home, I knocked at his door and asked permission to sit for a while in his parlor.

The windows looked into the street, and there I sat watching the doors of our new house, for Johanna and Julia to come out.  No man likes to be ordered out of sight, as if he were a vagabond or a criminal, and I felt myself aggrieved and miserable.