where men's lives are concerned, there had been no less than three break-downs on the road, and he had arrived too late. Afterwards I found that, half-an-hour after we set out, he reached my door, but no message had been left, and he had no clue to our whereabouts, so he had a long search before he found us. At that time I never thought. It did not occur to me strange that Silvia should be in Rome alone and unattended; I never asked myself or her how she knew of your marriage, or how she could care to marry me knowing what effect the news had had upon me. I felt something like a man under the influence of an opiate that has not made him perfectly unconscious—everything passes around him as in a dream, but he knows that by-and-by he will awake and see things as they really are.
"On the morning after we reached Florence, my senses came back to me; for the first time I saw face to face this thing that I had done; knew that, married though you were, I loved you as madly as ever; knew that the woman I had made my wife was less to me than one sound of your voice, one touch of your hand. And, strangely enough, you had not seemed so lost to me when I knew you to be the wife of another man, as now that I found myself the husband of another woman. I walked out of the house in the still early morning, and the first man I met was your husband, George Tempest. There must have been murder in my eyes as I looked at him, for he said at once, 'It is all a mistake.'
"I don't know what happened after that. In an hour we had set out for England. You know the rest."
Yes, I know the rest, as I look upon the face that is now no more than a shadow. The features are there, but where is the life, the glow, the spirit, that filled it in bravely a fortnight ago—only a fortnight ago!
And we stand looking, looking into each other's haggard countenances, and dare not put out so much as the tips of our fingers to
