indicating, rather than fitting well, her faultless figure, and forming the right background for the long waves of gold. But what an awful sadness was there in the beautiful pale features!

"Lady," said Helen, gazing on the Italian, whose beauty her eyes felt, "I am beautiful too, but my beauty has been a dreadful curse to my life ; no, not my beauty, but the hellish passion of man." Then rapidly she repeated her terrible tale for the second time to human ears.

Lorisse had fallen to her knees, and, supporting her bending form by a chair, she tried to stay her thick tears of grief. Helen still stood and spoke on in a low voice of the most concentrated passion. Then reaching the end, she said, in tones suddenly changing, "And this man, who has blighted my life, dares to hope for your pure hand!"

"Ronald?" "Yes."

The two women remained motionless, each so agitated with conflicting passions as to be scarcely conscious of the presence of the other. Then, without raising her eyes, Lorisse reached up her

hand-Helen took it-and Lorisse gently drew her down to her side. Helen's long gold fell over the dark bands of Lorisse's hair, and over her deep, rich cheeks, and the women put their soft arms around each other, one in a common shame, and in indignation against the foul wrong done to their womanhood.

When the passion of feeling gave way to thought, and thought grew definite, Lorisse was painfully conscious of a feeling which seemed to her selfish-a sense of relief in her own position through this terrible discovery. But she tried to think only of the poor creature at her side. "Poor Helen, I can say nothing to you. Your wrong is beyond comfort-unless there could be any remedy for you in the future from him who was to have been my husband."

"And will not be now ?"

"No."

"And I," said Helen, with fearful emotion, "could I bear to touch him, except to tear him limb from limb! You will hate him with human passion, but I hate him with the rage of hell! Remedy! There is none in the wide universe."

"But he is different now; and if he were

penitent, and gave his name to you and the child-"

"Do not torture me!

What, willingly brand

myself and the child with his name!"

"I will not say more, then; life has no redress, nor, perhaps, alleviation for such misery

Helen could have wept at the tones of deepest sadness in which Lorisse spoke, but that the sweet fountains of tears were burnt dry by the heat of her passion.

Presently Lorisse gently drew the trembling woman to her couch, and sat by her side, cooling her forehead and hands with perfume. She made her eat a little, too, presently, and drink a little wine. Lorisse took lunch at the same time with her, but scarcely touched anything. She asked some questions tenderly about the child, and promised to do anything she ever could to serve poor Helen.

When they were quite calm, Lorisse asked Helen if any one else knew her history.

"Only Mr. Magney ;" and she explained how

he had aided her, and with what goodness he had tried to alleviate the wretchedness of her lot.

The mention of this name did not come strangely. Lorisse's thoughts had already many times reached to him.

"And Mr. Magney knows all ?”

"All except the name of the man; he does not guess that."

"And you did not tell him that, because-"

66 Because I did not expect them to come back to the Hall. I only came here to die by my mother's grave.

for

"And even Mr. Magney cannot raise any hope you in your sorrow ?"

"Sometimes, a little. Never so much as last night, when he preached."

"Then," thought Lorisse, "Ronald must have seen Helen last evening going to church, when he had that sudden start, and complained of headache."

"I felt then," Helen continued, "that there might be some hope in my life, though it is so dreadfully sacrificed, if God sacrifices Himself also. I thought long hours over it last night,

N

but all the comfort has gone from me now, and it seems less real than the stuff of a dream."

"But," said Lorisse very tenderly, "may we not hope that the shame of your life is only apparent, and that a glory of sacrifice shines in the inner truth of it? Do we not live in a world of shows, very, very sad, but perhaps empty? Does it not seem as if there can be no giving without a proportionate receiving somewhere? And if any one has to lose, to give, her best— better than life and heaven-may it not be that there is a gain somewhere commensurate? Not to those who have wronged her,-curse must come to them,-but a gain to humanity, and, therefore, to ourselves again, if, as Mr. Magney says, we are to have a consciousness of all the gains coming from all our loss ?"

"But then," answered Helen, for a while sufficiently unconscious of her own misery to think on the subject which had so interested her, "this would be to intensify the sufferings of the good infinitely. How you were distressed when I told you of myself, and how grieved you will always be at it! And think how simply intoler