"I am not asking you to pay my debts," she replied with her grand air: the air of a woman accustomed to be admired for every attribute of her character, good or bad, and to do wrong with impunity. "But the money must be found somehow, and perhaps you can tell me where I am to get it."
"From your husband," he answered impetuously. "Yes, Valeria, from your one true and loyal friend. The one man you can ask in all honour to pay for your follies."
"You advise me to go to him!" exclaimed Valeria, livid with anger. "You!"
"Yes, I—I, who have wronged him deeply by a most fatal engagement which I have regretted ever since it was made. Not because you are not lovely, fascinating, all that is fairest and most desirable in womankind: but because I am hateful to myself on account of that treachery. What! to be the affianced lover of a woman whose husband's hand I grasped in seeming friendship: to smile in his face, to accept his kindness, his friendship, his confidence, while all my life was one long waiting for his death, while you and I were saying to each other every day, by and by we will do this, by and by we will go here and there, sail our yacht in the Mediterranean, build our cottage on the Scotch moor, by and by, when that good man who trusted us both is in his grave! O, it has been a hateful position, Valeria, base, miserable, guilty, accursed, for both of us: and, by the God who made us, it must come to an end."
There had been tears in his voice almost from the beginning of his speech, and at the end he broke down altogether and sobbed aloud.
Valeria rose out of her low chair, and stood before him straight as a dart. The movement was so quick, so instinct with an unholy grace, that it recalled the image of a cobra he had once seen rise up straight before him in the midst of his path through the jungle.
"You are in love with another woman!" she hissed, like the serpent. "That is the meaning of this sudden outbreak of virtue!"
He could not deny it.
"You want to break with me, in order that you may marry some one else," she said, whiter than death, her eyes dilating, her lips quivering.
"Yes," he answered quietly. "I could form a happier tie if you set me free. But there is not one word which I said just now about the feeling of my own baseness which was not just as true two years ago as it is to-day. Such a bond as ours never could bring happiness, Valeria, to man or to woman."
"It gave us hope," she said; "a fair dream of the future. Well, it is all over. Whatever it is worth it is gone—like a tuft of thistledown blown into the air. Go, Bothwell Gra-
