"Stand still!" she said, "or I shall murder you!"

The sudden change in her, the towering fury and intense abhorrence sparkling in her eyes and lighting up her brow, made him stop as if a fire had stopped him.

"Stand still!" she said, "come no nearer me, upon your life!" They both stood looking at each other. Rage and astonishment were in his face, but he controlled them, and said lightly,

"Come, come! Tush, we are alone, and out of everybody's sight and hearing. Do you think to frighten me with these tricks of virtue ?"

"Do you think to frighten me," she answered fiercely, "from any purpose that I have, and any course I am resolved upon, by reminding me of the solitude of this place, and there being no help near? Me, who am here alone designedly? If I feared you, should I not have avoided you? If I feared you, should I be here, in the dead of night, telling you to your face what I am going to tell?"

"And what is that," he said, "you handsome shrew? Handsomer so than any other woman in her best humour."

"I tell you nothing," she returned, "until you go back to that chair-except this, once again-Don't come near me ! Not a step nearer. I tell you, if you do, as Heaven sees us, I shall murder you!

"Do you mistake me for your husband?" he retorted with a grin.

Disdaining to reply, she stretched her arm out, pointing to the chair. He bit his lip, frowned, laughed, and sat down in it, with a baffled, irresolute, impatient air, he was unable to conceal; and biting his nail nervously, and looking at her sideways, with bitter discomfiture, even while he feigned to be amused by her caprice.

She put the knife down upon the table, and touching her bosom with her hand, said:

"I have something lying here that is no love trinket; and sooner than endure your touch once more, I would use it on you

---and you know it, while I speak-with less reluctance than I would on any other creeping thing that lives."

He affected to laugh jestingly, and entreated her to act her play out quickly, for the supper was growing cold. But the secret look with which he regarded her was more sullen and lowering, and he struck his foot once upon the floor with a muttered oath.

"How many times," said Edith, bending her darkest glance upon him, "has your bold knavery assailed me with outrage and insult? How many times in your smooth manner, and mocking words and looks, have I been twitted with my courtship and my marriage? How many times have you laid bare my wound of love for that sweet, injured girl, and lacerated it? How often have you fanned the fire on which, for two years, I have writhed; and tempted me to take a desperate revenge, when it has most tortured me?"

"I have no doubt, ma'am," he replied, "that you have kept a good account, and that it's pretty accurate. Come, Edith. To your husband, poor wretch, this was well enough

Why, if," she said, surveying him with a haughty contempt and disgust that he shrunk under, let him brave it as he would, "if all my other reasons for despising him could have been blown away like feathers, his having you for his counsellor and favourite would have almost been enough to hold their place."

Is that a reason why you have run away with me?" he asked her tauntingly.

"Yes, and why we are face to face for the last time. Wretch: we meet to-night, and part to-night. For not one moment after I have ceased to speak will I stay here!"

He turned upon her with his ugliest look, and griped the table with his hand; but neither rose, nor otherwise answered or threatened her.

“I am a woman," she said, confronting him steadfastly, "who from her very childhood has been shamed and steeled. I have been offered and rejected, put up and appraised, until my very

soul has sickened. I have not had an accomplishment or grace that might have been a resource to me, but it has been paraded, and vended to enhance my value, as if the common crier had called it through the streets. My poor, proud friends have looked on and approved; and every tie between us has been deadened in my breast. There is not one of them for whom I care, as I could care for a pet dog. I stand alone in the world, remembering well what a hollow world it has been to me, and what a hollow part of it I have been myself. You know this, and you know that my fame with it is worthless to me."

"Yes; I imagined that," he said.

"And calculated on it," she rejoined, "and so pursued me. Grown too indifferent for any opposition but indifference to the daily working of the hands that had moulded me to this; and knowing that my marriage would at least prevent their hawking of me up and down; I suffered myself to be sold as infamously as any woman with a halter round her neck is sold in any market-place. You know that."

"Yes," he said, showing all his teeth.

"I know that."

"And calculated on it," she rejoined once more, “and so pursued me. From my marriage-day, I found myself exposed to such new shame-to such solicitation and pursuit (expressed as clearly as if it had been written in the coarsest words, and thrust into my hand at every turn) from one mean villain, that I felt. as if I had never known humiliation till that time. This shame my husband fixed upon me; hemmed me round with, himself; steeped me in with his own hands, and of his own act, repeated hundreds of times. And thus-forced by the two from every point of rest I had-forced by the two to yield up the last retreat of love and gentleness within me, or to be a new misfortune on its innocent object-driven from each to each, and beset by one when I escaped the other-my anger rose almost to distraction against both. I do not know against which it rose higher the master or the man !"

He watched her closely, as she stood before him in the very