“What had she done?”

“Put me in a rage.  She had saddled herself upon me, when I wanted—­I wished for another to be my companion.”

“Blanche Challoner.”

“Blanche Challoner!” echoed Captain Levison, in a mocking tone; “what did I care for Blanche Challoner?”

Isabel remembered that he had been supposed in those days to care a great deal for Miss Blanche Challoner—­a most lovely girl of seventeen.  “Mrs. Vane used to accuse you of caring too much for her,” she said, aloud.

“She accused me of caring for some one else more than for Blanche Challoner,” he significantly returned; “and for once her jealous surmises were not misplaced.  No Lady Isabel, it was not Blanche Challoner I had wished to drive home.  Could you not have given a better guess than that at the time?” he added, turning to her.

There was no mistaking the tone of his voice or the glance of his eye.  Lady Isabel felt a crimson flush rising and she turned her face away.

“The past is gone, and cannot be recalled,” he continued, “but we both played our cards like simpletons.  If ever two beings were formed to love each other, you and I were.  I sometimes thought you read my feelings—­”

Surprise had kept her silent, but she interrupted him now, haughtily enough.

“I must speak, Lady Isabel; it is but a few words, and then I am silent forever.  I would have declared myself had I dared, but my uncertain position, my debts, my inability to keep a wife, weighed me down; and, instead of appealing to Sir Peter, as I ought to have done, for the means to assume a position that would justify me in asking Lord Mount Severn’s daughter, I crushed my hopes within me, and suffered you to escape—­”

“I will not hear this, Captain Levison,” she cried, rising from her seat in anger.

He touched her arm to place her on it again.

“One single moment yet, I pray you.  I have for years wished that you should know why I lost you—­a loss that tells upon me yet.  I have bitterly worked out my own folly since I knew not how passionately I loved you until you became the wife of another.  Isabel, I love you passionately still.”

“How dare you presume so to address me?”

She spoke in a cold, dignified tone of hauteur, as it was her bounden duty to speak; but, nevertheless, she was conscious of an undercurrent of feeling, whispering that, under other auspices, the avowal would have brought to her heart the most intense bliss.

“What I have said can do no hurt now,” resumed Captain Levison; “the time has gone by for it; for neither you nor I are likely to forget that you are a wife.  We have each chosen our path in life, and must abide by it; the gulf between us is impassable but the fault was mine.  I ought to have avowed my affection, and not have suffered you to throw yourself away upon Mr. Carlyle.”

“Throw myself away!” she indignantly uttered, roused to the retort.  “Mr. Carlyle is my dear husband, esteemed, respected, and beloved.  I married him of my own free choice, and I have never repented it; I have grown more attached to him day by day.  Look at his noble nature, his noble form; what are you by his side?  You forget yourself, Francis Levison.”