tears and kisses, and promised.

"We buried her," Inez went on, "and we parted. You went up to Oxford;
I went over to a Paris _pensionnat_. In the hour of our parting we
went up together hand in hand to her room. We kissed the pillow where
her dying head had lain; we knelt by her bedside as we had done that
other night. You placed this ring upon my finger; sleeping or waking
it has never left it since, and you repeated your vow, that that
night three years, on the twenty-third of September, I should be
your wife."

She lifts the betrothal ring to her lips, and kisses it. "Dear little
ring," she says softly, "it has been my one comfort all these years.
Though all your coldness, all your neglect for the last year and a
half, I have looked at it, and known you would never break your
plighted word to the living and the dead.

"I came home from school a year ago. _You_ were not here to meet and
welcome me. You never came. You fixed the first of June for your
coming, and you broke your word. Do I tire you with all these details,
Victor? But I must speak to-night. It will be for the last time--you
will never give me cause again. Of the whispered slanders that have
reached me I do not speak; I do not believe them. Weak you may be,
fickle you may be, but you are a gentleman of loyal race and blood;
you will keep your plighted troth. Oh, forgive me, Victor! Why do you
make me say such things to you? I hate myself for them, but your
neglect has driven me nearly wild. What have I done?" Again she
stretches forth her hands in eloquent appeal. "See! I love you. What
more can I say? I forgive all the past; I ask no questions. I believe
nothing of the horrible stories they try to tell me. Only come back to