could she say to his question-question asked, perhaps, with a world of ardent longing upleaping in his eyes-after Simonson, what could she reply to the question: "Hath these lips of thine ever before been kissed, thus and thus? These hands, so shapely, have they ever been pressed, so and so? This form divine has it ever been encircled and fondled by other hands and arms than mine, after this manner, and this, and this?"

Fiercely she hissed the answer: "Yes! yes, often, many times, numberless times, by a base-natured son of a depraved pariah, contemptuously called 'Old Abe Simonson, the drunkard-convict." "

"Oh, how I hate him!" in a tempest of rage. "What a luxury hatred has become! How delicious to despise such a hypocrite! Why did I yield to Harold's entreaty to be 'nice to the poor devil'? What happy, accurate nomenclature! 'Poor devil'! Thank heaven, the poor devil doesn't know all I've thought and felt toward him to-day—even to-night I'd determined to bid him hope! Now"

She was in a small upstairs reception room. "I'll go to my room and lock the door before Papa comes. Were I to meet him now, after our conversation in the library, and what he must have inferred from my actions, I'd have to lie to him-act the hypocrite. Then I'd be as base as that creature! Blessed mother, your prayer for me was not in vain! Your Vergie's vow is yet inviolate, and shall so remain! And yet-how tempted I have been all day! And to-night I even forgot my vow to the dead! What's there about that-that Simonson that is so appealing? People say it's his gentleness and honesty-bah! I know he's as false as Satan, and crueler than a serpent's fang!"

Going to her room, she had to pass Simonson's room. As she did so she heard him speak her name. "Vergie" -it was clear and distinct. She passed on. "Hypocrite,

419

to presume to speak my name. He knows that everybody's downstairs but Harold, and Harold's abed and asleep. He'd have a tête-à-tête, sub rosa, with his dupe-hands, arms, lips, ugh! He thinks it would be so romantic! I'd scorn

"Vergie-I want

Again the voice came clearly and distinctly. There was something in it wistful, plaintive, appealing.

"Maybe it's time to take his medicine. Possibly he's thirsty from fever," relenting somewhat.

"One would hardly treat a dog, a—a brute so mean as that to refuse drink or medicine when suffering."

Before she realized what she was doing she had returned, and entered the sick-room.

Sure enough, he was alone.

"Yes?" she said, with a rising inflection. ""Tis I, Vergie. Something you want?"

There was no response.

She crossed the room to his bedside. A dim light from the transom revealed his face. He was asleep. She looked, half-resentfully, into his face: so strong, so pale, so thin, such evidence of suffering and sorrow! She thought, "Oh, how can such a man, such a man, be a deceiver?"

"Vergie, I want-want-you!"

There was a world of pathos in his voice. Restlessly he turned his head on the pillow, showing that his troubles had invaded his slumber-his waking thought haunted him, even in the shadowy realm of phantasm. Evidently he was sound asleep.

"Do people lie in their sleep?" She remembered to have read that certain judges have held that the declarations of men in slumber, though not admissible as evidence, are probably true. "Oh, if I could only get a word from him in his sleep-right from his heart!"

What wonder she was excited? Too, she was fearful of discovery. But she wanted to know-but how could she question him in his sleep? People do not converse in their sleep. Yet she must find out-he must declare himself.

Leaning noiselessly above him, and imitating Marjorie's voice, which she could do to perfection—once had done it so perfectly even Fred, Marjorie's own brother, had been deceived-she gently said:

"Yes, dear; here's your Marjorie."

She did not have long to wait for her answer, though the instant seemed an eternity.

"No, no-it's Vergie-Vergie I-I want. I f-fought for -Verg-I—”" His voice trailed off into incoherence, but he had said enough.

She had her answer.

Vergie bowed her head and wept. Gently, very gently, she touched his brow, and her touch seemed to soothe him -at least his restless tossing ceased. His breathing, too, grew deeper and more regular.

"Heaven forgive me," she murmured. "It required almost a voice from the dead to set me right. O Sammy, Sammy, for my sake, for your Vergie's sake, live!"

And stooping low, she brushed his lips with a kiss, though ever so lightly, lest she should wake him, and passed out of the room.

CHAPTER XXVIII

vergie's absOLUTION FROM VOW MADE TO HER MOTHER

EVER was soul swept by fiercer tempest than that

which almost stranded Vergie when her brother informed her that he was no longer affianced to Marjorie Gildersleeve, and had not been for months.

The fury of a mob is so intense because all the longaccumulating wraths occasioned by the countless wrongs of preceding decades and centuries are instantly fused into one, and focused on the single outrage of the moment. The seething fury that razed the Bastile was not kindled by the arrest and incarceration of four forgers and three nondescript derelicts-but in that flash of time all the enormities of four centuries climaxed, and were concentred and converged on that isolated pin-point of time and circumstance. The single simple act which, ordinarily, would not have attracted a moment's notice, was the solitary flame-flecked match that ignited the deadly magazine of boundless indignation, precipitating the downfall of the Bastile, and the French Revolution, with all its nameless horrors.

So with Vergie. Her present wrath was the result of the concentration and focalization of the sum-total of all the hypocrisies and indignities she suddenly concluded Simonson had inflicted upon her.

Those who think her anger was out of proportion to the provocation, and that a girl so virile and regnant would have better governed herself, however dire her indignation, little

understand the tempestuous blood that is brewed under Southern skies, or the haughty and imperious dispositions that were bred by the baron-regime of the Slavocrat cavaliers-and of all that extraordinary race and epoch Vergie Culpepper was the most potent and exquisite culmination and consummation. As a Culpepper she was the

"Mild offspring of a dark and sullen sire,
Whose modest form, so delicately fine,

Was nursed in whirling storms,

And cradled in the winds."

Likewise her contrition, and instant surrender of herself, when convinced by his call out of the prison-house of dreams that he was true to her, had always been true, and that in fact he, not she, was the one wronged, was in perfect keeping with the Southern temperament.

Accordingly, nothing now could have surpassed Vergie's sweet engagingness- the inevitable opposite swing of the pendulum. This was her first great passion, made great not only by her own and her lover's temperaments and endowments, but also by the many unusual conditions and circumstances entering into their lives at New Richmond-and feminine intuition made her mistress of all the charms and wiles with which a beautiful woman loves to rapture the One Man.

Gladstone declared of one of his colleagues that his distinguishing characteristic was "a passion for philanthropy"; Vergie's distinguishing characteristic might, not inaptly, be said to have been a genius for loving, and calling forth all that was best and noblest in the one beloved.

And now there was nothing to hinder. The next morning the young lawyer was decidedly better. "A touch of love had almost made him well"; though the secret of her