Rachel paused a moment, and then said, slowly:

"He does not wish to be let go."

"He is mine."

"He was yours once," said Rachel, her face turning from white to gray. That wound was long in healing. "But he is mine now."

"Rachel, you cannot be bad all through." Lady Newhaven was putting the constraint upon herself which that tightly clutched paper, that poisoned weapon in reserve, enabled her to assume. For Hugh's sake she would only use it if other means failed. "You must know that you ought to look upon him as a married man. Don't you see"—wildly—"that we must marry, to put right what was wrong? He owes it to me. People always do."

"Yes, they generally do," said Rachel; "but I don't see how it makes the wrong right."

"I look upon Hugh as my husband," said Lady Newhaven.

"So do I."

"Rachel, he loves me. He is only marrying you for your money."

"I will risk that."

"I implore you on my knees to give him back to me."

And Lady Newhaven knelt down with bare, white outstretched hands. (Tableau number one. New Series.)

Rachel shrank back involuntarily.

"Listen, Violet," she said, "and get up. I will not speak until you get up." Lady Newhaven obeyed. "If I gave back Hugh to you a hundred times it would not make him love you any more, or make him marry you. I am not keeping him from you. This marriage is his own doing. Oh! Violet, I'm not young and pretty. I've no illusions about myself; but I believe he really does love me, in spite of that, and I know I love him."

"I don't believe it," said Lady Newhaven. "I mean about him. Not about you, of course."

"Here he is. Let him decide," said Rachel.

Hugh came in unannounced. Upon his grave face there was that concentrated look of happiness which has settled in the very deep of the heart and gleams up into the eyes.

His face changed painfully. He glanced from one woman to the other. Rachel was sorry for him. She would fain have spared him, but she could not.

"Hugh," she said, gently, her steadfast eyes resting on him, "Lady Newhaven and I were talking of you. I think it would be best if she heard from your own lips what she, naturally, will not believe from mine."

"I will never believe," said Lady Newhaven, "that you will desert me now, that all the past is nothing to you, and that you will cast me aside for another woman."

Hugh looked at her steadily. Then he went up to Rachel, and taking her hand, raised it to his lips. There was in his manner a boundless reverent adoration that was to Lady Newhaven's jealousy as a match to gunpowder.

Rachel kept his hand.

"Are you sure you want him, Rachel?" gasped Lady Newhaven, holding convulsively to a chair for support. "He has cast me aside. He will cast you aside next, for he is a coward and a traitor. Are you sure you want to marry him? His hands are red with blood. He murdered my husband."