came our first great sorrow, your mother's death."

She pauses a moment. Still he stands silent, but his left hand has gone up and covers his face.

"You remember that last night, Victor--the night she died. No need to ask you; whatever you may forget, you are not likely to forget _that_. We knelt together by her bedside. It was as this is a stormy summer night. Outside, the rain beat and the wind blew; inside, the stillness of death was everywhere. We knelt alone in the dimly-lit room, side by side, to receive her last blessing--her dying wish. Victor, my cousin, do you recall what that wish was?"

She holds out her arms to him, all her heart breaking forth in the cry. But he will neither look nor stir.

"With her dying hands she joined ours, her dying eyes looking at _you_. With her dying lips she spoke to you: 'Inez is dearer to me than all the world, Victor, except you. She must never face the world alone. My son, you love her--promise me you will cherish and protect her always. She loves you as no one else ever will. Promise me, Victor, that in three years from to-night you will make her your wife.' These were her words. And you took her hand, covered it with tears and kisses, and promised.

"We buried her," Inez went on, "and we parted. You went up to Oxford; I went over to a Paris _pensionnat_. In the hour of our parting we went up together hand in hand to her room. We kissed the pillow where her dying head had lain; we knelt by her bedside as we had done that other night. You placed this ring upon my finger; sleeping or waking it has never left it since, and you repeated your vow, that that night three years, on the twenty-third of September, I should be your wife."

She lifts the betrothal ring to her lips, and kisses it. "Dear little ring," she says softly, "it has been my one comfort all these years. Though all your coldness, all your neglect for the last year and a half, I have looked at it, and known you would never break your plighted word to the living and the dead.

"I came home from school a year ago. _You_ were not here to meet and welcome me. You never came. You fixed the first of June for your coming, and you broke your word. Do I tire you with all these details, Victor? But I must speak to-night. It will be for the last time--you will never give me cause again. Of the whispered slanders that have reached me I do not speak; I do not believe them. Weak you may be, fickle you may be, but you are a gentleman of loyal race and blood; you will keep your plighted troth. Oh, forgive me, Victor! Why do you make me say such things to you? I hate myself for them, but your neglect has driven me nearly wild. What have I done?" Again she stretches forth her hands in eloquent appeal. "See! I love you. What more can I say? I forgive all the past; I ask no questions. I believe nothing of the horrible stories they try to tell me. Only come back to me. If I lose you I shall die."

Her face is transfigured as she speaks--her hands still stretched out.

"O Victor, come!" she says; "let the past be dead and forgotten. My darling, come back!"

But he shrinks away as those soft hands touch him, and pushes her off.

"Let me go!" he cries; "don't touch me, Inez! It can never be. You don't know what you ask!"

He stands confronting her now, pale as herself, with eyes alight. She recoils like one who has received a blow.

"Can never be?" she repeats.

"Can never be!" he answers. "I am what you have called me, Inez, a traitor and a coward. I stand here perjured before God, and you, and my dead mother. It can never be. I can never marry you. I am married already!"

The blow has fallen--the horrible, brutal blow. She stands looking at him--she hardly seems to comprehend. There is a pause--the firelight flickers, they hear the rain lashing the windows, the soughing of the gale in the trees. Then Victor Catheron bursts forth:

"I don't ask you to forgive me--it is past all that. I make no excuse; the deed is done. I met her, and I loved her. She has been my wife for sixteen months, and--there is a son. Inez, don't look at me like that! I am a scoundrel, I know, but--"

He breaks down--the sight of her face unmans him. He turns away, his heart beating horribly thick. How long the ghastly pause that follows lasts he never knows--a century, counting by what he undergoes. Once, during that pause, he sees her fixed eyes turn slowly to his mother's picture--he hears low, strange-sounding words drop from her lips:

"He swore by your dying bed, and see how he keeps his oath!"

Then the life that seems to have died from her face flames back. Without speaking to him, without looking at him, she turns to leave the room. On the threshold she pauses and looks back.

"A wife and a son," she says, slowly and distinctly. "Sir Victor Catheron, fetch them home; I shall be glad to see them."

CHAPTER II.

WIFE AND HEIR.

In a very genteel lodging-house, in the very genteel neighborhood of Russell Square, early in the afternoon of a September day, a young girl stands impatiently awaiting the return of Sir Victor Catheron. This girl is his wife.

It is a bright, sunny day--as sunny, at least, as a London day ever can make up its mind to be--and as the yellow, slanting rays pour in through the muslin curtains full on face and figure, you may search and find no flaw in either. It is a very lovely face, a very graceful, though petite figure. She is a blonde of the blondest type: her hair is like spun gold, and, wonderful to relate, no Yellow Wash: no Golden Fluid, has ever touched its shining abundance. Her eyes are bluer than the September sky over the Russell Square chimney-pots; her nose is neither aquiline nor Grecian, but it is very nice; her forehead is low, her mouth and chin "morsels for the gods." The little figure is deliciously rounded and ripe; in twenty years from now she may be a heavy British matron, with a yard and a half wide waist--at eighteen years old she is, in one word, perfection.

Her dress is perfection also. She wears a white India muslin, a marvel of delicate embroidery and exquisite texture, and a great deal of Valenciennes trimming. She has a pearl and turquoise star fastening her lace collar, pearl and turquoise drops in her ears, and a half dozen diamond rings on her plump, boneless fingers. A blue ribbon knots up the loose yellow hair, and you may search the big city from end to end, and find nothing fairer, fresher, sweeter than Ethel, Lady Catheron.

If ever a gentleman and a baronet had a fair and sufficient excuse for the folly of a low marriage, surely Sir Victor Catheron has it in this fairy wife--for it is a "low marriage" of the most heinous type. Just seventeen months ago, sauntering idly along the summer sands, looking listlessly at the summer sea, thinking drearily that this time next year his freedom would be over, and his Cousin Inez his lawful owner and possessor, his eyes had fallen on that lovely blonde face--that wealth of shining hair, and for all time--aye, for eternity--his fate was fixed. The dark image of Inez as his wife faded out of his mind, never to return more.

The earthly name of this dazzling divinity in yellow ringlets and pink muslin was Ethel Margaretta--Dobb!

Dobb! It might have disenchanted a less rapturous adorer--it fell powerless on Sir Victor Catheron's infatuated ear.

It was at Margate this meeting took place--that most popular and most vulgar of all English watering-places; and the Cheshire baronet had looked just once at the peach-bloom face, the blue eyes of laughing light, the blushing, dimpling, seventeen-year-old face, and fallen in love at once and forever.

He was a very impetuous young man, a very selfish and unstable young man, with whom, all his life, to wish was to have. He had been spoiled by a doting mother from his cradle, spoiled by obsequious servants, spoiled by Inez Catheron's boundless worship. And he wished for this "rose of the rose-bud garden of girls" as he had never wished for anything in his two-and-twenty years of life. As a man in a dream he went through that magic ceremony, "Miss Dobb, allow me to present my friend, Sir Victor Catheron," and they were free to look at each other, talk to each other, fall in love with each other as much as they pleased. As in a dream he lingered by her side three golden hours, as in a dream he said, "Good afternoon," and walked back to his hotel smoking a cigar, the world glorified above and about him. As in a dream they told him she was the only daughter and heiress of a well-to-do London soap-boiler, and he did not wake.

She was the daughter of a soap-boiler. The paternal manufactory was in the grimiest part of the grimy metropolis; but, remarkable to say, she had as much innate pride, self-respect, and delicacy as though "all the blood of all the Howards" flowed in those blue veins.

He wasn't a bad sort of young fellow, as young fellows go, and frantically in love. There was but one question to ask, just eight days after this--"Will you be my wife?"--but one answer, of course--"Yes."

But one answer, of course! How would it be possible for a soap-boiler's daughter to refuse a baronet? And yet his heart had beaten with a fear that turned him dizzy and sick as he asked it; for she had shrunk away for one instant, frightened by his fiery wooing, and the sweet face had grown suddenly and startlingly pale. Is it not the rule that all maidens shall blush when their lovers ask _the_ question of questions?

The rosy brightness, the smiles, the dimples, all faded out of this face, and a white look of sudden fear crossed it. The startled eyes had shrank from his eager, flushed face and looked over the wide sea. For fully five minutes she never spoke or stirred. To his dying day that hour was with him--his passionate love, his sick, horrible fear, his dizzy rapture, when she spoke at last, only one word--"yes." To his dying day he saw her as he saw her then, in her summery muslin dress, her gipsy hat, the pale, troubled look chasing the color from the drooping face.