Holding fast her cold hands, he pleaded with all his eloquence, until, maddened by her silence, he even taunted her with loving another, while her own husband was living.

Then Adah started, and pushing him away, sprang to her feet, while the hot blood stained her face and neck, and a resentful fire gleamed from her brown eyes.

“It is not well for you to reproach me with faithlessness,” she said, “you, who have dealt so treacherously by me; you, who deliberately planned my ruin, and would have effected it but for the deeper-laid scheme of one you say is my father.  No thanks to you that I am a lawful wife.  You did not make me so of your own free will.  You did to me the greatest wrong a man can do a woman, then cruelly deserted me, and now you would chide me for respecting another more than I do you.”

“Not respecting him, Adah, no, not for respecting him.  You should do that.  He’s worthier than I; but, oh, Adah, Lily, wife, mother of my boy, do you love Irving Stanley?”

He was sobbing bitterly, and the words came between the sobs, while he tried to clutch her dress.  Staggering backward against the wooden beam, Adah leaned there for support, while she replied: 

“You would not understand if I should tell you the terrible struggle it was for me to be thrown each day in the society of one as noble, as good as Irving Stanley, and not come at last to feel for him as a poor governess ought never to feel for the handsome, gifted brother of her employer.  Oh, George, I prayed against it so much, prayed to be kept from the sin, if it were a sin, to have Irving Stanley mingled with every thought.  But the more I prayed, the more the temptation seemed thrust upon me.  The kinder, gentler, more attentive, grew his manners toward me.  He never treated me as a mere governess.  It was more like an equal at first, and then like a younger sister, so that few strangers took me for a subordinate, so kind were both Mrs. Ellsworth and her brother.”

“And he,” the doctor gasped, looking wistfully in her face, “does he—­do you think he loves you?”

Adah colored crimson, but answered frankly: 

“He never told me so; never said to me a word which a husband should not hear; but—­sometimes I’ve fancied, I’ve feared, I’ve left him abruptly lest he should speak, for that I know would bring the crisis I so dreaded.  I must tell him the whole then, and by my dread of doing this, I knew he was more than a friend to me.  I was fearful at first that he might recognise me, but I was much thinner than when I saw him in the cars, while my hair, purposely worn short, and curling in my neck, changed my looks materially, so that he only wondered whom I was so much like, but never suspected the truth.”

There was silence, a moment, and then the doctor asked:  “How is all this to end?”

The question brought into Adah’s eyes a fearful look of anguish, but she did not answer, and the doctor spoke again.