B aunt and cousins, for whom she had a sincere affection, and who had taken her part throughout in her disagreement with her husband. She could live with them without feeling that she was a burthen; on the contrary, her ample means were of practical use in the wandering life which modern ideas and ill-health combined, induced her sickly aunt to lead; carriages could be had, expeditions could be planned when Emilia was there, unthought of at other times. With her aunt, for many years a widow; with her elder cousin Sophy, also a widow, young, handsome, and childless, and expected to marry again some day; with her younger cousin Clarice, a charming young woman, too full of sentiment to care about marrying just yet, Emilia, in her somewhat dubious position, felt safe. They lived an exclusive life, with a select circle of friends, who gathered round them in the winter, whom they met at different tarrying-places in the summer; and in this limited world every one understood. For outsiders, and mere acquaintance, for their opinions and conjectures, Emilia cared but little. She went out not at all; she saw only the society she met at her aunt's house at Cannes, with which she mixed unaffectedly, but with reserve. She avoided all complications. Always gentle and intelligent, with a certain dignity and gracious kindliness to those about her, she was liked and admired by all who knew her; but nothing more. Some people wondered whether Mrs. Lawrence had a heart at all Emilia wondered herself sometimes; there was little to remind her of its existence, and she did not want to be reminded of it. This quiet round of days, varied by books, by travelling, by acquaintance, by the small family interests she shared with her aunt and cousins, just suited her, she had the habit of saying to herself. She had made a mistake; that was past and irremediable. Given the mistake, she had done the best she could with her life. And yet what a life it was! The thought came into her mind, as, pausing in her walk, she glanced round her apartment. It was an ordinary hotel room, but in the few days she had occupied it, it had already become transformed by the hundred trifles with which a wom an of ample means and cultivated tastes creates an unvarying atmosphere around her. Books and magazines and papers scattered on the table, a heap of silks and a square of fine embroidery, a glass with wild flowers, a water-color block, told of but they Emilia's varied occupations; told too of a life unfettered by active duties, unclaimed by others, a life to be longed for by some self-sufficing spirit, some devoted worshipper of self-culture, but one which filled Emilia now with a sudden sense of indescribable weariness, of heart-sickening monotony. She went up to the table; she opened one or two of the books; she took up a water-color sketch and laid it down again. A deadly sameness, a fatal mediocrity seemed to her eyes to be written on every page, to deaden everything she touched. What was to be the end of it all? To what could she look forward? What aim or hope did the future hold? She sat down by the table and thought. For three years she had been answering the question in her own fashion; she had answered it in every letter she had burned unopened, in every appeal from her hus band she had left without response. Emilia was less generous than her husband; she knew that she had been at least partly in the wrong; but she had not wanted to own it-not yet. She felt a dull shrinking from explanations, from a return upon a past which had been so filled with pain. She said to herself that she wanted peace, not change. What could change bring her but fresh trouble? She had spoken truly when she told her husband she did not want to read his letters. The past was dead. Oh, let it rest! But to-night another letter lay before her, a letter which she might leave unread indeed, but which she could not ignore. Should she leave it unread? Should she burn it as she had burned the others and refuse to see Lawrence to-morrow? Should she burn it? For a moment she held it towards the flame of the candle. A moment and all would be ended; tomorrow he would go away, and she would return to her old dead peace, to the old indifferent life with her aunt and cousins, the aimless travelling, the purposeless sight-seeing a darkness seemed to settle down upon Emilia at the thought. No, that could never be again; anything, any change, any pain even as a relief from that. The meeting with her husband had shaken her to her very soul; she felt it now, she felt herself torn away from the old life with its unexpectant dulness, to take part in a drama of vital interest. With a quick movement she drew the let ter away from the candle, she laid her hand upon the envelope to open it A knock at the door startled her. "Come in," she cried. She glanced at the timepiece on her table; it was not | knew, into a singular being, possessed of late. She had come early to her room, and it was little past ten o'clock. "Aunt Clarice is not ill?" said Emilia hastily. "Not now a will and energy of her own. And suddenly Emilia's mood changed. Why should she not go? If life must ever be a bondage, had she not chosen this one in preference to that other bondage against which she had revolted, from which she had fled? Had she not borne it for three years, and held herself con a little at her cousin, "don't look so miserable, child. I believe we shall find Marquise perfectly well, and that it is only a device of Stevens's to get away from Pau, where he is tired of being left alone. But I will go, and if you will kindly send Maria to me at once, she can pack up all that I shall want for to-morrow; the rest can come in the evening with Hardman." no. She was a little hys-tent? terical at first, but that is over now. No, "I will go, Clarice," she said, smiling it is not that; but we have had a letter from Stevens. It came up by a messenger from Pau; poor little Marquise is taken ill, and from what Stevens says, mamma is convinced that it is one of the attacks she had before we left Cannes, and that Stevens will not know how to treat it. Mamma is frantic; you know what it is, dear Emmy. She wanted to go off at once, only of course there is no possibility of getting a carriage to-night, and so I came to tell you that she wants us all to start at eight o'clock to-morrow morning. Hardman will stay behind to do the packing, and follow in the evening. You won't mind, will you, Emmy?" "I shall mind immensely," said Emilia, with an energy that surprised herself, "I cannot possibly go to-morrow." Her cousin looked aghast. Never since Emilia had lived with them had she asserted herself in this way; never had she shown anything but a half-indifferent acquiescence in whatever was proposed. "Why, Emilia,” she said in her plaintive voice, "I don't see what we are to do. I tell you, mamma is frantic about Marquise, and after all, it is only starting a day or two earlier than we proposed." "You can go without me," said Emilia, "why not? I will follow with Hardman when the packing is done; or I will keep Maria, and then Hardman can go with you. Aunt Clarice might prefer that." But when her maid had once more left her and all was quiet for the night, Emilia again paced the room from hour to hour with unquiet steps. She could not sleep; she could not even rest; for unresting thought possessed her, and her past and future held each other in.ceaseless strife, the past with its remembered pain, the future with its uncertain promise. She had thought to end the conflict, and it had hardly begun; she had thought to put a seal on her decision, and already the seal was broken, her purpose rent. paused presently, and taking up Lawrence's letter again, stood looking at it in a strange hesitation and uncertainty. Suddenly, with a brusque movement, she tore open the envelope, and sinking back in her armchair, she took out the letter and read. She She read with mixed feelings of pride, of remorse, of struggling pain; but she read the letter through twice, thrice; then throwing it down, she rose, and resumed Clarice stood speechless with dismay her restless pacing of the room. All at for a moment. “Why, Emilia,” she said once, moved by some sudden thought, she again, "you know mamma cannot bear took a candle from her writing-table, and that we should separate, and just now approached the looking-glass. She set when she is so nervous too and then if down the light, and twisting back her poor little Marquise were reaily to die, loosened hair with one hand, stood gazshe would be miserable. You know howing at the reflection of her own face. she adores her For years she had hardly cared to glance Emilia nearly laughed. She thought at the pallid, indifferent countenance that of her husband awaiting her reply to had met her view in the mirror; but tomorrow, while she should already have night that same face, flushed, excited, started on her way to Pau to help nurse startled from its mask of coldness into a sick dog. But her cousin's widening new warmth and color, arrested her. She eyes and look of dismay checked her. recognized that she was young, that she Evidently Clarice thought some strange was beautiful, that life after all was only spirit had entered into her cousin, chang- beginning for her. "Would to God that ing the gentle, indifferent Emilia she│I were free!" she cried in a passionate outburst, clasping her hands above her head. Her hair loosened from her grasp, fell in long, untwisting coils below her waist. Emilia took up one of the wavy chestnut locks, and looked at it, half smiling, passing it to and fro between her white fingers. Then, with a sudden shiver, she gathered it all together again and coiled it into a tight twist at the back of her head. "O God!" she cried again, "why was I sacrificed? Why am I not free?" And yet Lawrence's letter worked upon her. Against her will, as it were, she took it up and read it through once more; in spite of herself, the kind words, the kinder for their implied reproach, touched her heart. Here was a generous nature, she could not doubt, a good and kindly heart. She had behaved hardly, ungenerously to him, and he had no words of harsh reproach to give her; still less a strain of misplaced sentimentality that would have repelled her. He advanced no claim; he made no demands; he only appealed to her more generous nature, and that appeal she was free to accept or to reject. Free for these three years past she had been free to shape her life as she pleased; and what had she made of it? What poor, empty, shattered thing was it that time had left on her hands? Nay, if she were quite and altogether free, if her husband were to die to-morA thrill ran through Emilia; she did not want him to die, she said to herself hastily and pitifully, as though some one had reproached her with the involuntary thought. He had been kind to her that afternoon; she had not thought him kind years ago, when they both hated an indissoluble bond but he had been kind, and patient, and thoughtful this afternoon. It was long since any one had been kind to her in that way-yes, she must see him to-morrow, if it were only to bid him a friendly farewell. They would part friends this time row She went to the window and looked out. The night was nearly over, spent in these restless communings, the dawn was at hand; but Emilia felt no fatigue. The unwonted excitement was to her as the strength given by wine; it was like new blood coursing through her veins. She threw the casement wide open and leaned out. The rain had ceased; the clouds were clinging low, in long, faintly gleaming masses against the dark mountainside; some setting stars crowned the mountain peak; below stretched the black and motionless forests. There was no wind, no sound but the rushing of the torrent; the earth rested dark and dim and undefined under the dark sky, and in that mighty peace, that silent pause before. the awakening day, earth and sky seemed in harmony apart from humanity, apart from struggling souls that cannot grasp their meaning and feel only an alien pain in presence of that immense concord. Emilia leaned from the window; her vision pierced those mountain cliffs, that rocky barrier; it sought the ruddy dawn, the sunrise land, the far East that beckoned her, where already domes and minarets and golden waters were shining in the early morning sun. She lifted her face, she stretched out her arms in the chill air that precedes the dawn. "Not peace," she cried, "but life!" CHAPTER III. LAWRENCE also passed a sleepless night. Lawrence, somewhat strangely, perhaps, was more sensitive to the world's gossip, more irritated by the false position in which he and his wife stood towards each other, than Emilia. Probably more of that gossip reached his ears. Emilia, conscious that her conduct was irreproachable, knowing that at the time she left her husband she had thought to have excellent reasons for taking that step, wrapped herself in an impervious cloak of pale virtue, a cloak that gave no warmth to her heart, but kept off the chill of the censorious world; and safe within the shelter of a circle of sympathizing friends, heard nothing, and held that she cared nothing, for comments on her life. But Lawrence chafed in his position of deserted husband, at the odious breach in his domestic life that allowed a flood of light to fall on his private affairs and permitted them to be matters of public dis cussion. His wife was above suspicion of reproach; he had no uneasiness on that point; but it was impossible for him not to feel that the very fact that was his consolation, shifted the entire responsibil ity on to his own shoulders. Was he looked upon as a tyrant or a libertine ? he sometimes wondered bitterly. And then it angered him that a young and lovely woman whom he had the right to call his wife, should be less to him than the last pretty girl he took down to dinner; that the circumstances of a loveless marriage forbade him in all generosity from pressing his claims in a bond which she hated and had done her best to sever. It angered him, and it grieved him, for his was have seen her pass, and I can go and look for her." in truth a generous nature. He did not believe that Emilia was happy; how could she be happy in this chill and Lawrence, who had also risen early, anomalous position in which she had was standing on the hotel steps, a displaced herself? She did not look happy. mayed spectator of the packing of the Lawrence knew far more of Emilia than travelling-carriage. It was for Lady Mershe had known of him during these three iton's party, he was told by a waiter years. He had taken the habit lately of standing by; they were leaving unexpecttracking his wife's footsteps when it was edly. What, were they all going, all the possible for him to do so, of spending a ladies? Yes, all; all the rooms were day or two in the town which was her given up; only one of the lady's-maids abode for the time being, and disappear-remained behind to do the packing, and ing before she could be aware that he she was to follow in the evening. was there. There were few promenades in southern cities with which he had not become familiar, where at one time or another he had not recognized his wife's graceful head and indifferent glance as she sat driving at her aunt's side. The Cascine, the Chiaja, the Pincian Hill, the Promenade des Anglais, knew his presence as well as hers; for in the crowds of much-frequented places he had little difficulty in eluding her, in escaping the reproach of pursuing one to whom his presence, as he had been made to believe, was odious. It was in fact by the merest chance that they had met now. Some attraction had indeed drawn him to the Pyrenees when he knew that she was there; but he had avoided seeking her at Luchon. And yet to-night he reproached himself for a weak-minded fool, in not having sooner dared a meeting, in not having insisted on being heard, and breaking down the barrier his wife had raised between them. And yet would it have availed anything would it avail any thing now? When Clarice came to seek Emilia early the next morning, she found her room empty, save for the lady's-maid, who was engaged in locking her mistress's travelling-bag. Clarice inquired for Mrs. Lawrence. She had gone out, the maid replied; and further stated that she had found her mistress already dressed when she took her in her early cup of tea, and that she had gone out immediately after, saying that she should have time for a walk before they started. "But the carriage is there," said Clarice in distress, "and mamma will be ready immediately." She went to the window and looked out. "They are putting the things into the carriage already," she said, "and mamma cannot bear to be kept waiting. You don't know which way Mrs. Lawrence went, Maria? Do go and inquire down stairs; some one will perhaps Lawrence felt hurt and indignant as he had never felt before. That Emilia should elude him now, wounded him inexpressibly. Something more than this, he said to himself, he had a right to expect from his wife. He had counted-all night he had counted upon seeing her to-day; she had no right to refuse him another interview, to deny him the answer he had asked for. She was no slave to her aunt, she was independent, she could assert herself. At this moment, Maria appeared to inquire if anything had been seen of Mrs. Lawrence. Lawrence heard the question and the answer; he saw the man point in the direction Emilia had taken when she passed him half an hour before. Without a moment's hesitation he started to follow her. This time he would have an answer; she should not escape him this time Emilia had not gone very far, and she was at that moment hardly a hundred yards from the house. A turn of the road hid her from sight; but only a few steps afforded her a view of the hotel door, and assured her that she was not lingering too long. She herself could hardly have told why she had come out. Some childish impulse to escape and hide herself, some half-formed hope that being missed they might start without her, one chance she gave herself in a hundred that she might yet see Lawrence. For a thousand uncertainties, a thousand varying emotions held her still. Now she determined to remain behind, now the thought of her aunt's ner vous worry determined her to go; now she would see her husband, and now again, she would not see him. But when she indeed saw Lawrence coming towards her, she knew it was the hope of meeting him once more that had brought her there. He came towards her quickly with long strides. She was leaning on a low stone parapet that overhung the torrent, the fresh morning sunshine was upon her, and her face, shadowed by her dark hat, showed no trace of last night's vigil. life, and you, I think, will give me a kindly Rather, a more vivid carnation tinged her wish to carry away with me into mine. I cheeks, a clearer light shone in her eyes; leave you with friends, to the life you for Emilia was young, and excitement lent have chosen, where you are happy its hue more readily than weariness. Law- "Emilia ! cried Clarice's plaintive rence forgot his brief indignation as he voice at a little distance among the trees, came up to her. She turned and accosted" where have you gone? We are all bim gently. ready, and mamma is waiting." we "I am glad to see you," she said; are leaving suddenly for Pau; but I wanted to see you, I wanted" -she hesi tated for half a second-"I wanted to wish you good-bye." He was silent for a minute. "Well," he said after that pause, "good-bye is a hard word; but what you say I can but echo. Good be with you, Emilia.” Neither of them moved. There was again a silence, broken by Lawrence. "The time is short," he said, looking not at her, but at the rushing waters below, "and I have to say some words which, were I only your suitor would come from me with grace, which as your lover I might utter with a passion you could not despise, that I might urge upon you with a warmth that you could not resent; but which being your husband, I must speak with reserve and command myself to pronounce without too much emotion. When we married, I did not love you, as you know; I loved another woman, of whom we need not speak. But now, Emilia, I love you." He His voice changed involuntarily. uttered the last words in dry and husky tones, and turning, leaned his arms upon the parapet, and awaited her reply. It did not come; only a warm flush dyed her cheeks and deepened as he moved at last and his glance met hers. In a minute he went on, speaking in his usual voice, "Such words between you and me are folly no doubt, for as in the past, so in the future, I make no claim on you, Emilia. So far as I can set you free, you are free " He broke off. "Would to God," he cried with gathering passion and energy, "that you were in truth altogether free, so that you and I might meet on equal terms; that I might woo you, as I believe, before Heaven, I might win you yet!" He walked away a step or two, then came back to where Emilia stood, silent and motionless. Emilia started. Lawrence loosened his grasp of her hand, but unconsciously her own grasp tightened. "Oh!" she said, —is not happy · 66 my life is not happy is not happy She dropped his hand and put her handkerchief to her eyes, a strange betrayal of emotion in Emilia. In a moment she recovered herself. "Good-bye," she said, holding out her hand to Lawrence, but with an averted face. He took the hand, but it was he who now firmly held it clasped in his, as she tried to pass him by. "We cannot now part like this," he said. "Not happy you say that your life is not happy? Is it possible - good God! is it possible, Emilia, that you could trust it again to me She did not answer; pride struggled, and reserve and doubt. Oh! to end this uncertainty! And there stood the trav elling-carriage; she could see it through the trees from the bend of the road where they stood; her place was prepared; her old life awaited her how much simpler, how much safer to return to it! She tried to free her hand from Lawrence's, but he held it firmly. The moment was his at last. "Be generous, Emilia," he said, "give me a frank answer. So much at least I have a right to claim.” There came another cry of "Emilia." Lady Meriton had appeared on the steps of the hotel, accompanied by the bowing landlord Reine and Duchesse were being settled on their cushions; a familiar bark and yelp reached Emilia's ear. Then she turned and answered Lawrence. She spoke quickly, yet with gentleness and dignity. "You have a right," she said, “a right that I have neglected too long. Because you have been generous, I have been ungenerous; I see it now. Claiming nothing from you, I shut my eyes to a claim you would not urge. No, my life is not happy. It has become an inexpressible weariness to me. I cannot return to it — I speak frankly, as you tell me to do — I think". her voice faltered a little, her speech became nervous and more hurried "I think that with you my life might |