"He is in Scotland for a fortnight but I know everything. I know that you have insulted and defamed me." She spoke in a low voice and so calmly that he looked at her as if he thought she did not understand the meaning of her own words. "Till I met you," she went on, "I bore an unsullied name and reputation."

"What have I done to your name and reputation?" he asked, and closed his lips as though he were almost stupefied with silence. But he went a step towards her, with a shrinking, defensive movement. She retreated towards the table on which the candle stood, a flickering witness of the scene between them a scene full of shame and suffering and unconfessed fear for her, and of cruelty and loathing and bewilderment for him; but for both strangely destitute of fire and passion.

"You have ruined both," she said. "You have dared to make a pretence of marriage with me, though you were married already to an inferior person whom you had known at your lodgings."

"Who told you this?"

"I have seen and heard her. I know everything. You will retire from my presence this evening, and never enter it again."

"It is not true," he said shortly, and made another step forwards, and again she retreated.

"It is true. To-morrow I shall go to Liphook and expose your infamous behavior."

"If you dare," he said almost fiercely, and then, suddenly, he changed his note. "I was obliged to do it, Anne," he added, as if he had suddenly seen that the game was up, and lying would serve him nothing. "But I was fond of you; I told you there were many difficulties the night I asked you to marry me."

"No, Alfred"-and for the first time her lips quivered "you were not fond of me. Even then you were calculating that you would get the money Sir William Rammage had left me in his will."

"What should I know about his will?" "You were aware of its contents. You went to him in regard to the instructions. I have heard everything from his own lips." He was silent for a moment, and still there was no expression in his dull

you presumed after that to insult and impose on me."

"What are you going to do what do you want me to do?" he asked, almost curiously.

"I shall not treat you with the severity you deserve, but you will leave this house to-night and never enter it again."

"I should go to Liphook. You would not like that, Anne."

"Alfred," she said indignantly, "I could not accept shame and degradation, even from a man I love. Besides, I have no longer any love for you. You will not dare to offer me that. Every moment that you stay in my presence is an insult. I must insist on your leaving this house at once."

"Where am I to go?" he asked, still curiously. "That is for and I are apart."

your

consideration. You

"I have no money," he said, too much astonished, though he made no sign of it, to fight her fairly.

"You have sufficient money for your present necessities, Alfred. You must not think that you can deceive me any longer. I know everything about you.' Suddenly an idea occurred to him, and he asked in a manner that was almost a threat, though it had no effect upon her :"Have you been to Liphook?"

"I shall not tell you where I have been, Alfred; I have discovered your baseness, and that is sufficient. I know that our marriage was a mockery, that you dared to offer me what you had already given to another woman. You will go back to her, and at once. You came to me solely for my money, and of that you will not have one penny piece." Still he stood looking at her speechlessly, while with each word she said his loathing for her increased and his anger grew more difficult to control. His lips parted and showed his teeth, white and clenched together.

"I will have the money yet; and you shall suffer," he said.

"You will not," she answered, with a determined wink. "I have taken care of that."

"If you will ask him to stay in the kitchen, I will speak to him," she said. Then she turned to Alfred Wimple again. "You will only get yourself laughed at," he said. She was silent a moment; she saw what was in his thoughts and took advantage of it.

"It's very wet, ma'am; is the gentleman obliged to go to-night?"

He was trembling so that he could not speak.

She opened the door. "Jane," she called, "get Mr. Wimple's portmanteau; have you put everything into it?"

"Everything but the slippers. It's raining, ma'am," Jane added, not in the least understanding what was going on. But Aunt Anne had shut the door, and turned to Alfred Wimple again.

"Now you will go!" she said.

"I cannot go in the rain," he answered, and made a sound in his throat; "you know how bad my cough is. You cannot turn me out in this weather. I was angry just now. I did not mean it." "You will go immediately," she said; "you shall not remain another hour under my roof."

"It will kill me to go in this rain," he said doggedly.

"You would have killed me when you thought you would get William Rammage's money by it; you are not fit to remain another hour in the same house with the woman you have wronged, and you shall not. Your coat is in the hall, ready for you - and she went towards the door. "You will go this very moment, and you will never venture to come near me again."

"I have been coughing all day," he almost pleaded, utterly confounded by the turn things had taken.

"I brought you some lozenges from London, before I knew all your baseness" -and she fumbled in her pocket. "Here they are, and you can take them with you.' She put them down before him on the table, and went slowly out to the kitchen. "Officer," she said, "I will not detain you about the wood this evening. I want you to walk with Mr. Wimple as far as Steggalls', and see him into a wagonette; and

another word. The two men went out together. She shut the door, doublelocked it, and drew the bolts at the top and bottom - it was the last sound that Alfred Wimple heard as he left the cottage.

For a moment she stood still, listening to his footsteps; she waited to hear the click of the gate as it shut behind them. Then, with a strange, dazed manner, as if she were not quite sure that she was awake, she went back to the drawingroom.

"If you please, ma'am," asked the servant, "isn't Mr. Wimple coming back tonight? - for you won't like being left alone, and I don't know what to do about mother."

"You can go to her," Aunt Anne answered. A desperate longing to be alone was upon her; she wanted to think quietly, and it seemed impossible to do so while any one remained beneath the same roof with her. She was impatient for a spell of loneliness before she died. She felt that she was going to die, that she had heard her death-sentence in the shed beyond the valley. There was no gainsaying it- shame and agony were going to kill her. But first she wanted to be alone, to realize all that had happened, and how it had come about. She remembered suddenly, but only for a moment, that Alfred had stated that Sir William Rammage was dead. It was untrue, of course Alfred could not have known. Besides, William Rammage's life or death concerned her no longer; in his money she took no further interest. She only wanted to be alone and to think. "You can go to your mother, Jane," she repeated; "I wish to be left alone; I have a predilection for solitude."

'Yes, ma'am," the girl answered hesitatingly-"and you said I was to re

mind you about the wages; I wouldn't, only mother's bad."

"I will pay them." She opened her purse and counted out the few silver coins left in it. "I must remain a sixpence in your debt; this is all the change I have for the moment." She put her empty purse down on the table, and knew that she had not a penny left in the world. For a moment she was silent; she looked puzzled, as if she were doing a mental sum. Then she looked up. "Jane," she said, “you can take the remains of the chicken and the sole to your mother, and anything else that was left from dinner. I shall not require it." She dreaded seeing anything that Alfred Wimple had touched. She felt that, even down to the smallest detail, she must rid herself of all that had had to do with her life of shame and disgrace, and there was not much time left her in which to do it. She must begin at once; when she had made her life clean and spotless again she would look up and meet death unabashed.

"I am ready, ma'am," Jane said presently, and looked in, with her basket on her arm. Aunt Anne got up and followed her to the back door, in order to see that it was made fast. She shook with fear when she beheld the night. Under that sky and through the darkness Alfred Wimple was making his way to Liphook. The very air seemed to have pollution in it. She retreated thankfully to the covering of the cottage; but the stillness appalled her, once she was wholly alone in it. She stood in the hall for a moment and listened; there was not a sound. She waited for a moment at the foot of the stairs and remembered Alfred's room above, from which every trace of him had been removed, but she had not courage to mount the stairs. She went back into the little drawingroom and shut the door, and taking up her empty purse from beside the candlestick put it into her pocket. As in the morning her hand touched something that should not be there; but she knew what it was this time, and pulled it out quickly. It was the blue tie that she had kissed in the train. With almost a cry of horror, as if it were a deadly snake, she threw it on the fire and held it down with the poker, as William Rammage had held down his burning will. As she did so her eyes caught the wedding ring on her left hand; in a moment she had pulled it off her trembling finger and put it in the fire, too. The flame blazed and smoul

dered and died away, and her excitement with it. But she had not strength to rise from the floor on which she had been kneeling; she pulled the cushion down from the back of the easy-chair, and sank, a miserable heap, upon the rug.

From The National Review. HISTORICAL RIMINI.

As we cross the bridge which, with five immense arches of white marble, spans the Ariminus, antiquity is brought very close. A theatre or a temple only gives the measure of the gap that separates us from its occupants; but a bridge which for nearer nineteen than eighteen hundred years has been in daily use inspires one with a strange sensation of being drawn by this unbroken human chain into a magnetic contact with the first to pass over it. They read, as we read, its inscriptions telling how, begun by Augustus, it was finished by Tiberius; they, too, looked along the low-lying lands where the quails collect, to the buttresses of the Apennines that come to a point in the crown of rocks called formerly Titanus, and now San Marino. The river, the "still Marecchia cold and bright," flows as of old to its rest in the Adriatic; but the Ariminus had a shorter distance to go than the Marecchia, because the sea here, as along all the coast, has receded and is still rapidly receding.

The Emilian Way ends with the bridge; on the opposite side of the town the Via Flaminia opens with the arch of massive and stately proportions which was raised in gratitude to Augustus for having mend ed the great highroad to Rome. Like the bridge, it is of pure white travertine, mellowed, not stained, by age. It is surmounted by a battlement in the Scaliger style which was probably placed in its present position by well-meaning if not particularly happy restorers after the damage suffered when Rimini was besieged by the Goths. Anyhow, the battlement has aided the preservation of the monument. From before the tenth century bridge and arch have figured on the great seal of the city, which has never lost its pride in them as historical landmarks. But the classical legend most dear to Rimini is of an earlier date; the arch and the bridge did not exist when Cæsar crossed the Rubicon and made his first halt in this, which up to that day was the outpost, city of Italy. Although the stone

name.

Italy, the geographical expression which had been creeping up from somewhere in the old kingdom of Naples, and was destined to creep on till it got to the Quarnero, had comprised Rimini for about a century and a half when Cæsar made his sudden appearance there in the guise of a rebel. The city was taken by the Romans from the Senonian Gauls, who took it from the Etruscans, who had conquered its original Umbrian founders. Plenty of history might be found buried underneath it were there spades to dig it up. During the Empire it enjoyed great prosperity, and public works of all kinds were carried out, including the construction of a port and the paving of the streets. In the fourth century it was the scene of the council which for a moment made the world Arian, the twenty dissentient (i.e., orthodox) bishops escaping with a few of their followers to the part of the country still named La Cattolica. In the sixth it was incorporated in the exarchate; it was then that Romagna was first so called, not from its connection with Rome, but from being a province of the Holy Roman Empire. On the collapse of the Byzantine government, Pepin, summoned by the pope, wrenched the exarchate from its Lombard conquerors and made a present of it to the Church and Republic of Rome. It was an instance of how generous people can be with what does not belong to them. Rimini thus passed under the nominal control of the Holy See; but it continued to manage its affairs much as it chose, and it was so managing them when, in the thirteenth century, the star of the Malatesti rose.

"Rimini," said Addison, "has nothing modern to boast of." "Charmante petite ville... si féconde pour l'art et pour l'histoire," writes its great illustrator, Charles Yriarte, to whom it would seem inexplicable that any one should have re

They are not the least fortunate that know her story in no other form than in the sublime laconicism of the version which rendered it immortal. Who of all dead lovers are so real as Paolo and Francesca, their grace unmarred by the eternity of doom in which they move? For whom do we feel a more genuine pity than for the actors in this "saddest tragedy in these alti guai ?" Not that the justice of their punishment is permitted to be questioned; were it so, the singularity of standpoint that makes this different from all other stories of guilty love would be lost. "If the king of the universe were our friend," says Francesca, "we would pray him for thy peace." It is a womanly touch of charming courtesy; one of those touches that make her the most womanly of heroines. But never in the everlasting years will the king of the universe be their friend.

Dante the severe, Dante the tender, nowhere else struck a chord so purely pitiful. In the Ugolino canto there is another note, there is horror; here nothing interferes with the appeal to one sole emotion. Only the greatest poets in their greatest moments have triumphed thus in unmixed pathos, which needs the maximum reserve of strength, as it needs the strongest fingers to draw from the violin its most pathetic tones. The beauty and impressiveness of Dante are enhanced by the extreme simplicity of his classic style — simple sublimity, feeling, imagination, all combined with the most minute exactness of description. Where Milton is grandly vague, Dante is graphically precise; he never describes anything without giving you some object as a guide by which you may see what it is like. Besides all this, the Italian language attained in his hands