“Ah, why must I live?  Oh! that I could die—­if I could only die!” cries the poor child passionately in her thoughts, stretching out her hands in her young impatience of life and suffering.  “I love him—­is it wrong?  How can I help it?  I loved him before I knew what it meant, I never knew till——­”

She stopped suddenly, with a blush that seemed to set her cheeks all a-flame—­she had never known till half-an-hour ago, when she had looked up and met his eyes for that one moment.  Ah! why had he looked at her so?  And she—­oh, merciful heavens! had she betrayed herself?  At the very thought Madelon started as if she had been stung.  She turned from the window, she covered her face with her hands, and escaping swiftly, she fled to her own room, and throwing herself on the bed, buried her face in the pillow, to wrestle through her poor little tragedy of love, and self-consciousness, and despair.

And while Madelon is crying her heart out upstairs, this is what has been going on below.  There had been an uncomfortable pause in the sitting-room after her swift retreat; Mrs. Vavasour neither moved nor spoke, Maria knitted diligently, and Graham stood gloomily staring down on the music-stool where Madelon had sat and sung, and looked up at him with that sudden gleam in her eyes, till, rousing himself, he walked through the open window, into the garden, across the lawn, to the shrubbery.  He stood leaning over the little gate at the end of the path, looking over the broad moonlit field, where the scattered bushes cast strange fantastic shadows, and for the first time he admitted to himself that he had made a great, a terrible mistake in life, and he hated himself for the admission.  What indeed were faith, and loyalty, and honour worth, if they could not keep him true to the girl whose love he had won five years ago, and to whom he was a thousand times pledged by every loving promise, every word of affection that had once passed between them?  And yet, was this Maria to whom he had come back, this Maria so cold and indifferent, so alien from him in tastes, ideas, sympathies, was she indeed the very woman who had once won his heart, whom he had chosen as his life-long companion?  How had it all been?  He looked back into the past, to the first days after his return from the Crimea, when, wounded and helpless, worn out with toil and fever, he had come back to be tended by Englishwomen in an English home.  A vision rose before him of a blooming girl with blue ribbons that matched blue eyes, who came and went about him softly through the long spring and summer days, arranging his cushions, fetching his books, and reading to him by the hour in gentle, unvarying tones.  Yes, he understood well enough how it had all come to pass; but those days had gone by, and the Maria who had brightened them, was not she gone also? or rather, had she ever existed except in the eyes that had invested the kind girl-nurse with every perfection?  And now what