the Atlantic waves, sunken to little dainty frills of lace-like
foam, broke murmuringly at their feet,--and he, turning suddenly to
his companion, was all at once smitten by a sense of witchery in her
looks as she stood garmented in her white, vaporous ball-gown, with
diamonds in her hair and on her bosom--smitten with an overpowering
lightning-stroke of passion which burnt his soul as a desert is
burnt by the hot breath of the simoon, and, yielding to its force,
he had caught the small, fine, fairy creature in his arms and kissed
her wildly on lips and eyes and hair. And she,--she had not
resisted. Then--as swiftly as he had clasped her he let her go--and
stood before her in a strange spirit of defiance.

"Forgive me!" he said, in low uneven tones--"I--I did not mean it!"

She lifted her eyes to his, half proudly half appealingly.

"You did not mean it?" she asked, quietly.

An amazed scorn flashed into her face, clouding its former
sweetness--then she smiled coldly, turned away and left him. In a
kind of stupor he watched her go, her light figure disappearing by
degrees, as she went up the ascending path from the sea to the house
where gay music was still sounding for dancers not yet grown weary.
And from that evening a kind of silence fell between them,--they
were separated as by an ice-floe. They met often in the social
round, but scarcely spoke more than the ordinary words of
conventional civility, and Morgana apparently gave herself up to
frivolity, coquetting with her numerous admirers and would-be
husbands in a casual, not to say heartless, manner which provoked
Seaton past endurance,--so much so that he worked himself up to a