When, after her interview with Edith, Mrs. Goddard went out to make her call, leaving her brother to keep watch and ward over their fair captive, she proceeded with all possible speed to the Copley Square Hotel, where she inquired for Mrs. Stewart.

The elevator bore her to the second floor, and the pretty maid, who answered her ring at the door of the elegant suite to which she had been directed, told her that her mistress was engaged just at present, but, if madam would walk into the reception-room and wait a while, she had no doubt that Mrs. Stewart would soon be at liberty. "Would madam be kind enough to give her a card to take in?"

Mrs. Goddard pretended to look for her card-case, first in one pocket of her wrap, then in another.

"Ah!" she exclaimed, "I must have left my cards at home! How unfortunate! But it does not matter," she added, with one of her brilliant smiles; "I am an old acquaintance, and you can simply announce me when I am admitted."

The girl bowed and went away, leaving the visitor by herself in the pretty reception-room, for she had been told not to disturb her mistress until she should ring for her.

Mrs. Goddard looked curiously around her, and was impressed with the elegance of everything in the apartment.

Exquisite paintings and engravings graced the delicately tinted walls; choice statuettes, bric-a-brac, and old-world curios of every description, which she knew must have cost a small fortune even in the countries where they were produced, were artistically arranged about the room.

There was also an air of refinement and rare taste in the draperies, carpets, and blending of color, which proclaimed the occupant of the place to be above the average lady in point of culture and appreciation of all that was beautiful.

Impressed with all this, and looking back to her meeting with Mrs. Stewart, on the evening of the ball at Wyoming—remembering her beauty and grace, and the elegance of her costume, madam's heart sank within her, and she seemed to age with every passing moment.

"Oh, to think of it!—to think of it, after all these years! I will not believe it!" she murmured, with white, trembling lips, as she arose and nervously paced the room.

Presently the sound of muffled voices in a room beyond attracted her attention.

She started and bent her ear to listen.

She could catch no word that was spoken, although she could distinguish now a man's and then a woman's tones.

With stealthy movements she glided into the next room, which was even more luxuriously furnished than the one she had left, when she observed that the portieres, draping an arch leading into still another apartment, were closely drawn.

And now, although she could not hear what was being said, she suddenly recognized, with a pang of agony that made her gasp for breath, the voice of her husband in earnest conversation with the woman who had been her guest two nights previous.

As noiselessly as a cat creeps after her prey, Anna Goddard stole across that spacious apartment and concealed herself among the voluminous folds of the draperies, where she found that she could easily hear all that was said.

"You are very hard, Isabel," she heard Gerald Goddard remark, in a reproachful voice.

"I grant you that," responded the liquid tones of his companion, "as far as you and—that woman are concerned, I have no more feeling than a stone."

At those words, "that woman," spoken in accents of supreme contempt, the eyes of Anna Goddard began to blaze with a baneful gleam.

"And you will never forgive me for the wrong I did you so long ago?" pleaded the man, with a sigh.

"What do you mean by that word 'forgive?'" coldly inquired Mrs. Stewart.

"Pardon, remission—as Shakespeare has it, 'forgive and quite forget old faults,'" returned Gerald Goddard, in a voice tremulous with repressed emotion.

"Forget!" repeated the beautiful woman, in a wondering tone.

"Ah, if you could," eagerly cried her visitor; then, as if he could control himself no longer, he went on, with passionate vehemence: "Oh, Isabel! when you burst upon me, so like a radiant star, the other night, and I realized that you were still in the flesh, instead of lying in that lonely grave in far-off-Italy—when I saw you so grandly beautiful—saw how wonderfully you had developed in every way, all the old love came back to me, and I realized my foolish mistake of that by-gone time as I had never realized it before."

Ah! if the man could have seen the white, set face concealed among the draperies so near him—if he could have caught the deadly gleam that shone with tiger-like fury in Anna Goddard's dusky eyes—he never would have dared to face her again after giving utterance to those maddening words.

"It strikes me, Mr. Goddard, that it is rather late—after twenty years—to make such an acknowledgment to me," Isabel Stewart retorted, with quiet irony.

"I know it—I feel it now," he responded, in accents of despair. "I know that I forfeited both your love and respect when I began to yield to the charms and flatteries of Anna Correlli. She was handsome, as you know; she began to be fond of me from the moment of our introduction; and when, in an unguarded moment, I revealed the—the fact that you were not my wife, she resolved that she would supplant you—"

"Yes, 'the woman—she gavest me and I did eat,'" interposed his companion, with a scathing ring of scorn in the words. "That is always the cry of cowards like you, when they find themselves worsted by their own folly," she went on, indignantly. "Woman must always bear the scorpion lash of blame from her betrayer while the world also awards her only shame and ostracism from society, if she yields to the persuasive voice of her charmer, admiring and believing in him and allowing him to go unsmirched by the venomous breath of scandal. It is only his victim—his innocent victim oftentimes, as in my case—who suffers; he is greeted everywhere with open arms and flattering smiles, even though he repeats his offenses again and again."

"Isabel! spare me!"

"No, I will not spare you," she continued, sternly. "You know, Gerald Goddard, that I was a pure and innocent girl when you tempted me to leave my father's house and flee with you to Italy. You were older than I, by eight years; you had seen much of the world, and you knew your power. You cunningly planned that secret marriage, which you intended from the first should be only a farce, but which, I have learned since, was in every respect a legal ceremony—"

"Ha! I thought so!" cried her companion, with a sudden shock. "When did you hear?—who told you?"

"I met your friend, Will Forsyth, only two years ago—just before my return to this country—and when I took him to task for the shameful part which he had played to assist you in carrying out your ignominious plot, telling him that you had owned to his being disguised as an aged minister to perform the sacrilegious ceremony, he confessed to me that, at the last moment, his heart had failed him, whereupon he went to an old clergyman, a friend of his father, revealed everything, and persuaded him to perform the marriage in a legal manner; and thus, Gerald Goddard, I became your lawful wife instead of your victim, as you supposed."

"Yes, I know it. Forsyth afterward sent me the certificate and explained everything to me," the man admitted, with a guilty flush. "I received the paper about a year after the report of your death."

"Ah! that could not have been very gratifying to—your other—victim," remarked Mrs. Stewart, with quiet sarcasm.

"Isabel! you are merciless!" cried the man, writhing under her scorn. "But since you have learned so much, I may as well tell you everything. Of course Anna was furious when she discovered that she was no wife, for I had sworn to her that there was no legal tie between you and me—"

"Ah! then she also learned the truth!" interposed his companion. "I almost wonder you did not try to keep the knowledge from her."

"I could not—she was present when the document arrived, and the shock to me was so great I betrayed it, and she insisted upon knowing what had caused it, when she raved like an insane person, for a time."

"But I suppose you packed her by being married over again, since you have lived with her for nearly twenty years," remarked Mrs. Stewart.

"No, I did not," returned her visitor, hotly. "To tell the truth, I had begun to tire of her even then—she was so furiously jealous, passionate, and unreasonable upon the slightest pretext that at times she made life wretched for me. So I told myself that so long as I held that certificate as proof that she had no legal hold upon me, I should have it in my power to manage her and cow her into submission when she became ungovernable by other means. I represented to her that, to all intents and purposes, we were man and wife, and if we should have the ceremony repeated, after having lived together so long, it would create a scandal, for some one would be sure to find it out, sooner or later. For a time this appeared to pacify her; but one day, during my absence from home, she stole the certificate, although I thought I had concealed it where no one would think of looking for it. It has been in her possession ever since. I have tried many times to recover it; but she was more clever than I, and I never could find it, while she has always told me that she would never relinquish it, except upon one condition—"

"And that was—what?"

"Ever the same old demand—that I would make her legally my wife."

"But she never could have been that so long as I lived," objected Mrs. Stewart.

"True; but she would have been satisfied with a repetition of the ceremony, as we did not know that you were living."

"If you have been so unhappy, why have you lived with her all these years?"

The man hesitated for a moment before replying to this question. At length he said, although he flushed scarlet over the confession:

"There have been several reasons. In spite of her variable moods and many faults, Anna is a handsome and accomplished woman. She entertains magnificently, and has made an elegant mistress for our establishment. We have been over the world together several times, and are known in many cities both in this country and abroad, consequently it would have occasioned no end of scandal if there had been a separation. Thus, though she has tried my patience sorely at times, we have perhaps, on the whole, got along as amicably as hundreds of other couples. Besides—ahem!—"

The man abruptly ceased, as if, unwittingly, he had been about to say something that had better be left unsaid.

"Well—besides what?" queried his listener.

"Doubtless you will think it rather a humiliating confession to make," said Gerald Goddard, with a crestfallen air, "but during the last few years I have lost a great deal of money in unfortunate speculation, so—I have been somewhat dependent upon Anna in a financial way."

"Ah! I understand," remarked Mrs. Stewart, her delicate nostrils dilating scornfully at this evidence of a weak, ease-loving nature, that would be content to lean upon a rich wife, rather than be up and doing for himself, and making his own way in the world. "Are you not engaged with your profession?"

"No; Anna has not been willing, for a long time, that I should paint for money."

"And so your talents are deteriorating for want of use."

The scorn in her tones stung him keenly, and he flushed to his temples.

"You do not appear to lack for the luxuries of life," he retorted, glancing about the elegant apartment, with a sullen air, but ignoring her thrust.

"No, I have an abundance," she quietly replied; but evidently she did not deem it necessary to explain how she happened to be so favored.

"Will you explain to me the mystery of your existence, Isabel?" Mr. Goddard inquired, after an awkward silence. "I cannot understand it—I am sometimes tempted to believe that you are not Isabel, after all, but some one else who—"

"Pray disabuse yourself of all such doubts," she quickly interposed, "for I assure you that I am none other than that confiding but misguided girl whom you sought to lure to her destruction twenty years ago. If it were necessary, I could give you every detail of our life from the time I left my home until that fatal day when you deserted me for Anna Correlli."

"But Anna claims that she saw you dead in your casket."

A slight shiver shook the beautiful woman from head to foot at this reference to the ghastly subject.

"Yes, I know it—"

"You know it!" exclaimed the man, amazed.

"Exactly; but I will tell you the whole story, and then you will no longer have any doubt regarding my identity," Mrs. Stewart remarked. "After you left Rome with Anna Correlli, and I realized that I had been abandoned, and my child left to the tender mercies of a world that would not hesitate to brand her with a terrible stigma, for which her father alone was to blame, I resolved that I would not live. Grief, shame, and despair for the time rendered me insane, else I, who had been religiously reared, with a feeling of horror for the suicide's end, would never have dared to meditate taking the life that belonged to God. I was not so bereft of sense, however, but that my motherhood inspired me to make an effort to provide for my little one, and I wrote an earnest appeal to my old schoolmate and friend, Edith Allandale, who, I knew, would shortly be in Rome, asking her to take the child and rear her as her own—"

"What! Then you did not try to drown the child as well as yourself!" gasped Gerald Goddard, in an excited tone.

"No; had I done so, I should never have lived to tell you this story," said the woman, tremulously. "But wait—you shall learn everything, as far as I know, just as it happened. Having written my appeal, which I felt sure would be heeded, I took my baby to the woman who had nursed me, told her that I had been suddenly called away, and asked her to care for her until my return. She readily promised, not once suspecting that a stranger would come for her in my place, and that it was my purpose never to see her again. From the moment of my leaving the woman's house—that last straw of surrendering my baby was more than my heart and brain could bear—everything, with one exception, was a blank to me until I awoke to consciousness, five weeks later, to find myself being tenderly cared for in the home of a young man, who was spending the winter in Rome for his health. His sister—a lovely girl, a few years his senior—was with him, acting both as his nurse and physician, she having taken her degree in a Philadelphia medical college, just out of love for the profession. And she it was who had cared for me during my long illness. She told me that her brother was in the habit of spending a great deal of his time upon the Tiber; that one evening, just at dusk, as he was upon the point of passing under a bridge, a little way out of the city, he was startled to see some one leap from it into the water and immediately sink. He shot his boat to the spot, and when the figure arose to the surface, he was ready to grasp it. It was no easy matter to lift it into his boat, but he succeeded at last, when he rowed with all possible speed back to the city, where, instead of notifying the police and giving me into their hands to be taken either to a hospital or to the morgue, as the case might demand, he procured a carriage and took me directly to his home, where he felt that his sister could do more for me than any one else."

"Who was this young man?" Gerald Goddard here interposed, while he searched his companion's face curiously.

"Willard Livermore," calmly replied Mrs. Stewart, as she steadily met his glance, although the color in her cheeks deepened visibly.

"Ha! the man who accompanied you to Wyoming night before last?"

"Yes."

"I have heard that he has long wanted to marry you—that he is your lover," said Mr. Goddard, flashing a jealous look at her.

"He is my friend, stanch and true; a man whom I honor above all men," was the composed reply; but the woman's voice was vibrant with an earnestness which betrayed how much the words meant to her.

"Then why have you not married him?"

"Because I was already bound."

"But you have told me that you did not know you were legally bound until within the last two years."

Isabel Stewart lifted a grave glance to her companion's face.

"When, as a girl, I left my home to go with you to Italy," she said, solemnly, "I took upon myself vows which only death could cancel—they were as binding upon me as if you had always been true to me; and so, while you lived, I could never become the wife of another. I have lived my life as a pure and faithful wife should live. Although my youth was marred by an irrevocable mistake, which resulted in an act of frenzy for which I was not accountable, no willful wrong has ever cast a blight upon my character since the day that Willard Livermore rescued me from a watery grave in the depths of the yellow Tiber."

And Gerald Goddard, looking into the beautiful and noble face before him, knew that she spoke only the truth, while a blush of shame surged over his own, and caused his head to droop before the purity of her steadfast eyes.

"All efforts upon the part of Miss Livermore and her brother to resuscitate me," Mrs. Stewart resumed, going on with her story from the point where she had been interrupted, "were unavailing. Another physician was called to their assistance; but he at once pronounced life to be extinct, and their efforts were reluctantly abandoned. Even then that noble brother and sister would not allow me to be sent to the morgue. They advertised in all the papers, giving a careful description of me, and begging my friends—if there were such in Rome—to come to claim me. Among the many curious gazers who—attracted by the air of mystery which enveloped me—came to look upon me, only one person seemed to betray the slightest evidence of ever having seen me before. That person was Anna Correlli—Ah! what was that?"

This sudden break and startled query was caused by the rattling of the rings which held the portieres upon the pole across the archway between the two rooms, and by the gentle swaying of the draperies to and fro.