"And you have done it. I have felt that I could kneel and worship you for it--but, Christine, the truth is too evident to be avoided. He is unworthy of you. Suppose you could be free from him?"

"Divorce?" she said with a sort of horror. "Never! I scarcely know what it is--but marriage seems to me a thing indissoluble and inviolate. I cannot forget that he is the father of my child. I could never wish, on that account, to be free from him."

"Christine, there is another way. Oh, my poor, poor child, you have never even thought of it, and it breaks my heart to tell you. But there is a way you might be free from him without divorce--a sad and dreadful way, my poor little sister, but remember, I implore you, that there is light beyond the darkness. Oh, cannot you think what I mean?"

She shook her head.

"I know he is not dead," she said; "there is no other way that I know."

"Suppose--my poor girl, try to be brave now, for you will have to know it--suppose your marriage to him was not legal--was no marriage at all?"

Her face got scarlet.

"That is not possible," she said, "and if it were, it would make no difference. If he did it without knowing--"

"Christine, Christine, he did not! He knew it, my child. Prepare yourself for the very worst. He deceived you wilfully. Oh, Christine, when he was married to you there was an impossible barrier between you.

It was such a thing as you could not dream of. Give me your hands and try to feel that your brother bears this sorrow with you." He caught her other hand also and pressed them both between his own.

"Christine, he was married already. When he married you, he had already a wife and child."

She wrenched her hands away and sprang to her feet. A low cry broke from her. Noel felt that it was he who had applied the torture, and he saw her racked with agony and utterly heedless of the comfort he had offered, and had fondly hoped to give her.

"Have you proof for what you say?" she cried, her wild look of confusion and terror making her so unlike her usual self that he seemed not to know her. "I will never believe it without the strongest proof. It is too horrible, too awful, too deadly, deadly shameful to be true. Be quick about it. If there is proof, let me have it."

"Christine, there is proof. I have it here on the spot, but spare yourself, my poor, poor girl. Wait a little--"

"Don't talk to me of waiting. Let me see what you have got. Oh, can't you see that I can bear anything better than not to know? Show me what you have and if what you say is true--"

But she turned away as if his eyes upon her hurt her, and raised her arm before her face. In an instant she lowered it and said entreatingly:

"Oh, show me what you have. Have pity on me."

Noel took the envelope containing the picture from his pocket.

"This has been sent me by a lawyer," he said. "The woman is his client.

She says he gave her this picture soon after they were married. Oh, Christine, don't look at it--"

But she walked toward him steadily and took the envelope from his hand.

He could not bear to see her when her eyes rested on it, so he turned away and walked off a few paces, standing with his back toward her.

There was a moment's silence. He heard her slip the picture from the envelope, and he knew that she was looking at it. He heard his watch tick in the stillness, and her absolute silence frightened him. It lasted, perhaps, a moment more and then he turned and looked at her. She was standing erect with the picture in her hand. He saw that she had turned it over and that it was upon the reverse side that her eyes were fixed. There was some writing on it which he had not seen.

She held the photograph out to him, with an intense calm in her manner, but he saw that her nostrils quivered and her breath came short. Her hands were trembling, too, but her voice was steady as she said:

"I am convinced."

He glanced down at the picture and saw written on the back in a weak, uncertain hand which Christine had evidently recognized, "To my darling little wife, from Robert."

He felt her humiliation so intensely that he could not look at her, but he took a step toward her and was about to speak when she turned away and, with a tottering step, went toward the sofa and fell heavily upon it, her face buried in her hands. A long breath that was almost a groan broke from her, and then she lay very still, except that now and then a violent shiver would run all along her frame. Poor Noel! He felt the bitterness of the false position he had tried to occupy. If he had been indeed her brother, this awful grief might have spent itself, to some extent, in his arms. He felt that he was nothing to her, but his heart was none the less soft toward her for that.

Thrusting the picture back into his pocket, he drew a chair near to her, and sat down by her side. He wanted her to feel that he was there, in case she should find it in her heart to turn to him for a help he did not venture to intrude. It seemed a long while that they remained so, but at last Christine sat up, turning upon him a face so strange and terrible that he trembled at the look of it. Sorrow had seared it like a blight. She had been lying upon a seam in the lounge and it had left a red mark across her face. He thought it looked like the wound upon her heart made visible.

"I can never see him again," she said. "I cannot go home. Oh G.o.d, I have no home! It never was a home to me, except when my baby was in it. Oh, my baby boy!--my baby boy!--my little child that loved and clung to me!

Oh, G.o.d was merciful to take you. My G.o.d, I see it now! I thank Thee, I thank Thee, I thank Thee!"

She fell on her knees on the floor, and then she threw herself forward on the couch, and hiding her face again shook from head to foot with great, tearless sobs.

"Oh, I am so glad he is dead! It is so sweet to me to think it! I would have had to look into his big, clear eyes that used to seem to read my very heart, and think of this! Oh, if only I could go and lie beside my baby, in the deep, still ground where the cruel eyes of men and women could not see us, I would want no other home. I have been lonely and miserable, lying in my bed at night, without him, and I have felt that he missed and needed me, as I did him. Oh, if only G.o.d would let me go to him, I would be willing to be put into his grave alive and wait for death to come! It would be easier than life with this thing branded on me."

"Branded on you! Oh, Christine, you must not say it. You will not be branded; you will be, as you have always been, best and purest and truest among women--to me at least. What have you ever been but an angel of n.o.bleness and heroism and devotion to duty? Oh, Christine, I could worship you."

She rose to her feet and stood before him.

"I believe G.o.d will reward you in Heaven for those words," she said.

"You are a man who can see as He sees, in truth and clearness, and you know, as He does, I have tried to do right. But what you do not know, what He alone can know, is how I have suffered--how every sacred feeling of my woman's heart has been torn and desecrated, and dragged to the earth, and how I endured it all, because I thought it was my duty--and all the time it was--Oh, I feel as if I don't know what may happen to me next to drag me deeper down in misery and sorrow. I thought the worst had come when my baby died, and now a thing so terrible has come as to make that the comfort that I hug to my soul."

She sank to a seat on the couch again, and Noel came and took the place at her side.

"Give me your hand," she said tremblingly. "Oh, I feel so frightened.

Now that this has come I feel that the air is full of awful horrors that are waiting to fall upon me."

Noel took her hands in both his own, and she clung to them with a pitiful intensity.

"The worst is over," he said gently. "You have only to let me manage and think for you now--"

"Tell me," she said, "tell me all there is to know--how you found this thing out, and what will be done about it. You must tell it every word to me. I can bear it better now than ever to speak of it again."

And Noel told her, as mercifully and gently as he could, all that he had learned from the lawyer's statements. He wanted to show her how convincing and certain the proof was, that she might be justified in acting on it. She held his hands in a hard grasp and looked at him with excited, distended eyes as she listened to it all. The mixture of wildness and calm in her manner and looks positively terrified him. He feared her reason might be temporarily disturbed, and would have given worlds to see her cry and complain, but she heard him through with the same excited stillness.

"I have a safe and pleasant refuge for you for the present, Christine,"

he said. "I have arranged everything. A lady--a dear friend of mine, whose son was my friend and a man I loved devotedly--this lady will take you and care for you as a daughter. I have told her everything and she is waiting for you now, longing to love and comfort you. Her son is dead and she has often told me that I, as his friend, came next in her affections, and that she would do anything on earth to serve me. I was able to help him once and she never forgot it. So I went and told her all the truth. She has a mind as clean and simple as your own, Christine, and she is longing to love and comfort and take care of you.

You will let me take you to her--will you not?"

"Oh, yes," she said. "G.o.d bless you for it. I could never go back there again," she added with a shudder, "but I must write a letter."

She rose hastily and Noel, wondering, brought her writing materials.

She wrote a hasty note, and sealing it, asked him to have it sent at once. To his surprise he found it was addressed to Dallas.

"I will give it to the janitor as we go down," he said. "Do you feel able to go now, Christine? A carriage will be waiting for us and I will take you to that dear woman who will make you feel as if your mother's arms were around you."

Christine was trembling in every limb, but she reached for her bonnet and tried to tie it on. Her hands shook so that she let it fall. Noel picked it up and held it a moment, saying soothingly:

"Don't hurry. We can wait a little while, if you wish. Try not to be too despairing. When you drive away from here to-day you leave the past behind you, and enter into a new and different life. Your new friend, Mrs. Murray, will know you only as you are now, and you may meet no one unless you wish to. She has very few friends herself, and she will tell them what she chooses of you. You will see she is not a woman that people will dare to ask questions of."

He stopped. A look so dreary, strange and full of anguish had come into Christine's face that he was alarmed and said quickly:

"What is it?"