“Edna, will you wait here for me?” asked Gertrude.

“Why can not Mr. Murray bring you to the house?  There is nothing more to see here.”

“Allow us to judge for ourselves, if you please.  There is a late Paris paper, which will amuse you till we return.”

St. Elmo threw a newspaper at her feet, and led Gertrude away through one of the glass doors into the park.

Edna sat down on the edge of the aquarium, and the hungry little fish crowded close to her, looking up wistfully for the crumbs she was wont to scatter there daily; but now their mute appeal was unheeded.

Her colorless face and clasped hands grew cold as the marble basin on which they rested, and the great, hopeless agony that seized her heart came to her large eyes and looked out drearily.

It was in vain that she said to herself: 

“St. Elmo Murray is nothing to me; why should I care if he loves Gertrude?  She is so beautiful and confiding and winning.  Of course, if he knows her well he must love her.  It is no business of mine.  We are not even friends; we are worse than strangers; and it can not concern me whom he loves or whom he hates.”

Her own heart laughed her words to scorn, and answered defiantly:  “He is my king! my king!  I have crowned and sceptred him, and right royally he rules!”

In pitiable humiliation she acknowledged that she had found it impossible to tear her thoughts from him; that his dark face followed—­haunted her, sleeping and waking.  While she shrank from his presence, and dreaded his character, she could not witness his fond manner to Gertrude without a pang of the keenest pain she had ever endured.

The suddenness of the discovery shocked her into a thorough understanding of her own feelings.  The grinning fiend of jealousy had swept aside the flimsy veil which she had never before fully lifted; and looking sorrowfully down into the bared holy of holies, she saw standing between the hovering wings of golden cherubim an idol of clay demanding homage, daring the wrath of conscience, the high priest.  She saw all now, and saw, too, at the same instant, whither her line of duty led.

The atmosphere was sultry, but she shivered; and if a mirror could have been held before her eyes, she would have started back from the gray, stony face so unlike hers.

It seemed so strange that the heart of the accomplished misanthrope--the man of letters and science, who had ransacked the world for information and amusement—­should surrender itself to the prattle of a pretty young thing, who could sympathize in no degree with his pursuits, and was as utterly incapable of understanding his nature as his Tartar horse or his pet bloodhound.