pression had come over his face as he sat by Ursula, which made him look older and sterner than he ordinarily did, notwithstanding his gray beard and hair.

But Ursula cared nothing whatever for his wrath or his discontent. She turned her white shoulder, gleaming like marble, decidedly upon him, and went on fascinating her other neighbour. When she rose from the table and prepared to enter the salon, Lock managed to get near enough to her to whisper,

'Woman, are you gone mad? Beware how you insult my friends!'

She saw that fierce displeasure burnt in her husband's eyes, but she only gave him a haughty stare, though she heard his breath come hard and quick and his teeth grind together in fury; and when the guests had dispersed, the man Abel Wychcote lingered to the last, for John Lock had urged his stay, hoping that Ursula would come to her senses, and by some graceful concession atone in some measure for her evident rudeness during the evening; but with the lofty demeanour of a goddess she swept out of the room and went up-stairs, passing out of their sight like some gorgeous tropical bird that wings its way heedless of snares, and defying all danger that may beset its reckless path.

'You'll bring down that woman's insolent spirit, Mr. Lock,' Abel Wychcote hissed out with the venom of a serpent. 'She trod me down before the rabble you had here as though I were dirt beneath her dainty feet. By God, John Lock, By God, John Lock, I should like to crush her!'

'Ursula is young and heedless,' murmured the other man, in a humble apologetic tone, 'and she is very beautiful. The admiration so openly evinced in Washington has turned her head a little, and we

must make excuses for her want of courtesy to-night.'

'I don't accept excuses, my friend. You will please teach your wife to whom she is to be civil, and if you don't teach her, I will!

Now if Ralph Pierce had been a witness to this, he would have known that his torturer had found a torturer in turn,

CHAPTER XXXVIII.

A LETTER FROM THE DEAD.

URSULA was to go to Liverpool to see her father, and the date of her departure had been fixed for the day succeeding the reception. She thought of her intended voyage to England with a flutter of mingled delight and nervousness as she mounted the stairs, leaving her husband and his ally together. Letters had frequently passed between her and Ralph Pierce, but they had been extremely vague and unsatisfactory on both sides. The subject that lay deepest in the heart of each could not be alluded to in black and white. The letters, therefore, had been as it were but mere husks, incapable of satisfying any hunger of the soul. Up to this time the woman had shrunk from meeting her father face to face, lest she should be unable to conceal from him all the feverish misery brought on her by the sacrifice she had made. She was, with all her manifold and grievous faults of character, brave enough to desire concealment of the vulture whose beak was for ever gnawing at her heart. But about this time her health commenced to give way, and a desperate yearning crept over her to speak once more with the poor old man who had suffered so much, and for whose sake she had suffered so much.

While mounting the stairs another memory flashed across her brain this day was the anniversary of her marriage with John Lock-this day year she had known herself to be the widow of Bernard Keane !

The thought shot through her soul, harrowing it, and she resolutely tried to thrust it aside, but it would not be evaded, and returned again and again with overwhelming force. The feverish excitement of the evening was over, 'the lights were fled, the garlands dead,' and she had no power left to resist the despondency that poured in like a flood over her. In spite of her beauty, the sparkle of the world, the homage, amounting to adoration, that was offered her on every side, she was a miserable woman.

A superbly-appointed boudoirhung with satin, glittering with bric-a-brac, replete with luxury and suggestive of wealth-opened out of her bedroom, and in it Ursula was wont to spend a good deal of her time. Notwithstanding the rose-coloured curtains, the voluptuous fauteuils, the mirrors that threw back tint for tint and line for line of her own exquisite face, hours passed therein had lagged many a time on leaden wings.

She entered the room on this night of triumph weary and depressed, for amid the splendour she had no genuine enjoyment. In her mightiest social success the heart in her bosom continually cried out in anguish for the love which had passed away for ever. Go where she would, say what she would, Bernard Keane's form seemed eternally by her side, Bernard Keane's voice whispered in

her ear.

The woman who had sparkled like a star in the reception room slunk like a wretched criminal into the privacy of her own cham

ber, knowing herself to be perjured and desolate. Now, when it was too late, the still small voice of conscience made itself heard; and Ursula, hating her fate, hated with still bitterer hate John Lock who had worked it.

A fire was burning in the grate of polished steel, soft lights fell through shades that seemed moulded out of pearls, a gleam of satin and a snowy vapour of lace floated before the windows, but she saw nothing, heeded nothing of such things. Sick of prosperity and detesting the wealth and success she had been so eager in seeking, down into the depths of an easy-chair she dropped, and clasping both her hands over her knees, she fell into a train of harrowing thought.

'Just one year,' she murmured, 'just one year; and yet how long it seems, how long it seems! O my God, will all my life drag on like this?'

The large tears rolled down her cheeks and dropped away like diamonds, and they could have been counted one by one as they fell and were lost amidst the whiteness of her dress.

She planted her feet on the fender and bowed down her face on her knees, shuddering visibly and moaning audibly over that one year of her life. Twelve months a widow, and all those twelve months a wife. The wife of a man she knew to be hard and unscrupulous and vile-a man she longed to crush beneath her heel as she would have crushed a serpent. After a while the woman arose and prepared to undress herself. She stood once more gazing at herself in the glass. She was all changed and sad, and regarded her beauty with heavy drooping eyes from which all lustre was fled. How

strangely the golden hair gleamed back on her from the surface of the mirror-the hair which ought to have been hidden away under a

widow's cap! The very rustle of her rich train brought a shiver to her frame. One by one she pulled off the costly jewels John Lock had lavished on her and flung them carelessly aside; then, drawing a deep breath, she folded both arms over her bosom and sat down again, with such feelings of freedom as a slave knows when the chains are shaken from his limbs.

The brilliants seemed to burn holes in her flesh.

She sat a full hour, while the fire got low and a cold chill passed over her.

'I am cold,' she moaned, looking wearily around. 'Is it that he -Bernard-is near me, bringing the ice of the grave with him? O Bernard, do you hate and despise me from that other world? I did it for my father-only for my father! Have none of the angels you are among told you how I loathe all this? Others would not believe it, but surely you will-you will!'

Shivering, Ursula looked round for some garment to wrap round her. A heap of brilliants flashing on the white marble of her dressing-table mocked her by their coldness. She pushed them farther away with violence; they were the gift of the man whose voice came droning to her from below-a voice she would gladly know to be hushed for ever.

Ursula Lock on this night was a murderess in soul. Her hand would have dealt a death-blow without a tremor-her eyes would have gazed without flinching on the death-throes of the man to whom she was linked by hateful bonds. She would have hesitated at nothing which would rend her ties asunder.

Luckily for the woman, ways and means were wanting as yet to accomplish the evil work; and plans of vengeance for the wrong John Lock had done in wedding her but

floated through her brain-misty and intangible.

Ursula began to prepare for her journey; but she resolved that no vestige of the unholy wealth around should go with her.

No; she would return to her old home, free for a while, at any rate, from aught to remind her that she was John Lock's wretched and loathing wife.

All at once she remembered the shabby little trunk that had been so hastily packed on the morning of her fatal wedding day. In that was a dress her father had paid for, the very garment she had put on that morning, while her heart swelled in joy at the prospect of seeing Bernard again.

On reaching Washington she had carefully thrust the dress aside; for it now seemed to her like sacrilege to wear it in the presence of her second husband; and she held it sacred, as widows keep their mourning garb, long, long after it has faded and grown worn and useless.

She started up, and seizing a waxlight from her dressing-table, passed into a tiny passage, in which the old battered box was stowed away. She trembled like an aspenleaf as she dragged it out of its hiding-place, while her face grew deadly white.

There it was the quiet dovecoloured dress, with its cheap and modest violet trimming-lying carefully folded on the very top of a heap of garments that were unworthy of a lady of fashion and wealth.

Big, hot, blinding tears welled in the large black eyes as Ursula took up the dress and fled from the passage, having no courage to look at anything else in the trunk that would bring a flood of bitter remembrance upon her.

'Poor thing, poor thing! how natural it looks!' she murmured

piteously, unfolding it with awe and reverence as though it had been a shroud. And so it wasthe shroud of shattered love and of dead hope.

'How happy I was after all, Bernard, when I wore it! Nothing this wretch has given me shall cross the threshold of the poor but peaceful home where you and I have been together-the dear old room where my darling first said he loved me! And now, and now -O God, O God!-Bernard is dead, and I am John Lock's wife!'

She fell down prone on her trembling knees; and burying her face on the cushion of the chair, sobbed in pitiful distress; while the voice of her husband rose up from the lower room, where he still held a secret conference with Abel Wychcote.

Passionate and genuine grief, however, must exhaust itself sooner or later; and Ursula's sobs subsided by degrees.

Then, after a while, she seated herself by the white ashes of the fire, and resolutely unfolded the dress in which she resolved to travel the following day. As she examined it with loving eyes, a paper rustled under her hand. She drew it forth from the pocket, and, listlessly leaning towards the light, she saw that it was a letter directed to herself.

She knew the handwriting well. All around her scarlet mouth came the broad white line of agony and surprise.

Was it a letter from the dead? She rose up shaking from her chair, and, tottering like an old woman, she went up close to the light, read the letter through steadily twice, examined the date of it, and fell upon the floor.

It was the letter Nell had given her just one year ago a letter from Bernard Keane, full of affection, and imploring her to go to him in

London. It was dated the ninth of May, and the newspaper extract regarding the railway accident was of the second of May. That date was inscribed on her brain in letters of fire; and the woman knew at once how foully John Lock had wronged and deceived her.

In her fall her hand struck the steel fender, and the letter fell inside. A spark from the dying embers seized it, grew, brightened, and spread into a long red tongue of flame, that left nothing but a scroll of black gossamer, quivering and writhing like a creature in pain amid the gray ashes. And the long red tongue of flame had revealed one thing more -a human face, livid in hue, contracted and locked as though death had suddenly come to it in the crisis of a great agony.

When John Lock went up-stairs an hour later, he found his wife sitting on the hearthrug, with her hands clenched together, and her eyes fascinated, as it were, by some fragments of burnt paper that fluttered in the grate. He went into the room noiselessly-a smile, soft and oily, on his mouth-but his footfall aroused Ursula.

She lifted her white grief-stricken features to the light, saw who entered, and with a strange, wild, half-stifled cry, sprang to her feet like a panther.

CHAPTER XXXIX.

URSULA SPEAKS.

URSULA did not go back to her old home in Liverpool. Her courage failed, and she shrank from now crossing the threshold. So Ralph Pierce found her at an hotel where neither of them was known by sight. 'Father!' 'Ursula !'

She was thin, haggard, and

weary-looking-altogether a wreck of the girl with whom he had parted a short twelvemonth back. He held her at arms' length, and saw at one glance that her black eyes were larger, and the lashes shadowed them more darkly. The rich peach-bloom which had glowed so brightly on her cheek had softened and almost faded away. She breathed quickly, and with an unequal heave of her bosom, arising from the simple exertion of mounting the stairs. Ralph Pierce recollected the bloom, the strength that were gone, and gazed at her in dismay.

'Ursula, are you ill?'

'Ill!-no. Why should you think

so?

• You are so changed, my child.'

'Changed, yes; but not ill-at least not seriously so.'

She coughed sharp and hard, and then gave a forced little laugh. 'Has he come ?'

As the old man asked the question the dread of his enemy came back to him, and showed itself in his paling face and hesitating voice; and it was an unspeakable relief to him when she answered,

'No; I came alone. He was too busy to leave America, and I wanted to see you so much, father. Besides, I must, I must—'

She flung off the black-lace shawl from her shoulders as though it weighed on them like a load of iron, cast her bonnet from her head, and threw her gloves after it with one of her old impatient gestures. Then she pushed back her hair from her temples with both hands, and sank into a chair, breathing deeply.

"Father!' 'Yes.'

The man is a fiend in human form! I hate him!'

'Has he ill-treated you? has he dared already-'

'Hush, hush! don't be agitated. Nothing of that. And I wish he would-I wish he would! Hate, cruelty, even blows-anything, anything would be easier to bear than his love!

'But he is generous, Ursula.' 'Generous! yes. He pelts his diamonds and his money at me; but I loathe them.'

'You used to like such things, Ursula.'

'Did I? They might be worthless stones now. They only remind me of my misery.'

'You have a luxurious home?' he asked anxiously. He longed to hear of some return for the terrible sacrifice she had made.

'A palace. But I should breathe more freely in a hovel.'

'Would you go back to one?'

'Would I! No, unless Bernard Keane came back to me; then I should be happy anywhere. I would go in rags, I would starve if he could come back to me, father; but he never will. I am a wicked perjured wretch!' she cried out, with passionate vehemence, and Bernard must know it.'

Pierce took her hands in his. Her hands were ice-cold, and struck a chill to his heart.

'Did you love Bernard Keane so, Ursula ?'

'Love him! You will never guess, never dream, how-how-' 'How much you loved him?' 'Yes,' she faltered.

'And John Lock is your husband?'

'Why do you tell me that? It stings me cruelly; it taunts me to death! To be tied to a fiend-a devil, father-for ever, for ever!'

She burst into a shower of tears, while the poor old man looked on helplessly, hopelessly. Far better, he thought, it would have been to have suffered on for the short span of his years than that she, so young and so beautiful, should have been