bracelet of diamon's? Wicked, I have watch' you look at them--"

"No, no," he interrupted earnestly. "I have not once looked away from
you, I _could n't_." Their eyes met, but instantly hers were lowered;
the bright smile with which she had been rallying him faded and there
was a pause during which he felt that she had become very grave. When
she spoke, it was with a little quaver, and the controlled pathos of
her voice was so intense that it evoked a sympathetic catch in his own
throat.

"But, my frien', if it should be that I cannot wish you to look so at
me, or to speak so to me?"

"I beg your pardon!" he exclaimed, almost incoherently. "I didn't mean
to hurt your feelings. I wouldn't do anything you'd think ungentlemanly
for the world!"

Her eyes lifted again to his with what he had no difficulty in
recognizing as a look of perfect trust; but, behind that, he perceived a
darkling sadness.

"I know it is true," she murmured--"I know. But you see there are time'
when a woman has sorrow--sorrow of one kind--when she mus' be sure that
there is only--only rispec' in the hearts of her frien's."

With that, the intended revelation was complete, and the young man
understood, as clearly as if she had told him in so many words, that she
was not a widow and that her husband was the cause of her sorrow. His
quickened instinct marvelously divined (or else it was conveyed to him
by some intangible method of hers) that the Count de Vaurigard was a