“Yes, yes; I was blinded by passion, a girl’s passion, Mr. Blake, born of glamour and gratitude; not the self-forgetting devotion of a woman who has tasted the bitterness of life and so learned its lesson of sacrifice.  I may not have thought, certainly I did not realize, what I was doing.  Besides, my father and brother were not convicted criminals at that time, however weak they had proved themselves under temptation.  And then I believed I had left them behind me on the road of life; that we were sundered, irrevocably cut loose from all possible connection.  But such ties are not to be snapped so easily.  They found me, you see, and they will find me again—­”

“Never!” exclaimed her husband.  “They are as dead to you as if the grave had swallowed them.  I have taken care of that.”

“But the shame! you have not taken care of that.  That exists and must, and while it does I remain where I can meet it alone.  I love you; God’s sun is not dearer to my eyes; but I will never cross your threshold as your wife till the opprobrium can be cut loose from my skirts, and the shadow uplifted from my brow.  A queen with high thoughts in her eyes and brave hopes in her heart were not too good to enter that door with you.  Shall a girl who has lived three weeks in an atmosphere of such crime and despair, that these rooms have often seemed to me the gateway to hell, carry there, even in secrecy, the effects of that atmosphere?  I will cherish your goodness in my heart but do not ask me to bury that heart in any more exalted spot, than some humble country home, where my life may be spent in good deeds and my love in prayers for the man I hold dear, and because I hold dear, leave to his own high path among the straight and unshadowed courses of the world.”

And with a gesture that inexorably shut him off while it expressed the most touching appeal, she glided by him and took her way to the room where her father and brother awaited her presence.

CHAPTER XIX

EXPLANATIONS

“I cannot endure this,” came in one burst of feeling from the lips of Mr. Blake.  “She don’t know, she don’t realize—­Sir,” cried he, suddenly becoming conscious of my presence in the room, “will you be good enough to see that this note,” he hastily scribbled one, “is carried across the way to my house and given to Mrs. Daniels.”

I bowed assent, routed up one of the men in the next room and despatched it at once.

“Perhaps she will listen to the voice of one of her own sex if not to me,” said he; and began pacing the floor of the narrow room in which we were, with a wildness of impatience that showed to what depths had sunk the hope of gaining this lovely woman for his own.

Feeling myself no longer necessary in that spot, I followed where my wishes led and entered the room where Luttra was bidding good-bye to her father.