A Mere Chance Volume II Part 19

"Would that be in accordance with the terms of your philosophy?"

"Yes, it would. For nature makes us with many capacities. Some of them counteract the others. Don't talk of these things any more, Beatrice--I don't like it."

"Very well, dear; I won't."

The little lady got up from her seat on the floor, opened a window, put the teacups on the table, and asked her cousin if she had seen the beautiful Persian tiles that Mr. Kingston had just had sent out to him for one of the dados in the new house.

Rachel responded absently, gazed for a little while in silence upon the sleepy garden full of flowers and humming bees, and as Mrs. Reade had expected, returned herself to the abandoned topic.

"At any rate," she said thoughtfully, "there is one thing I would always do. I would tell the truth. I would never have secrets. I would sooner do the wrongest thing, the wickedest crime, than hide it. If I _feel_ things in my heart--well, my husband, if I have one, shall know all that I know. And I will never do anything that he--that the whole world--may not see."

"Does that seem to you so easy?" inquired Beatrice, settling a top-heavy rosebud in a slender Venetian vase. "Did you never have any secrets that you were afraid to tell?"

The girl was silent for several minutes. She was crimson to the throat, and her face was turned away from her companion.

"I will do what is sure to be right and--safe," she said at last, falteringly; "I will never marry anybody, if I do not marry Roden."

THE END OF THE SECOND VOLUME.