you than he is. I, at any rate, try to help you out of trouble, but he does not, bless his invisible face! The words of the stern prophet Hosea that I used to read come back to me. Don't you know them, Tess?—"And she shall follow after her lover, but she shall not overtake him; and she shall seek him, but shall not find him: then shall she say, I will go and return to my first husband; for then was it better with me than now!" . . . Tess, my trap is waiting just under the hill, and—darling mine, not his!—you know the rest.'
Her face had been rising to a dull crimson fire while he spoke; but she did not answer.
'You have been the cause of my backsliding,' he continued jauntily; 'you should be willing to share it, and leave that mule you call husband for ever!'
One of her leather gloves, which she had taken off to eat her skimmer-cake, lay in her lap, and without the slightest warning she passionately swung the glove by the gauntlet directly in his face. It was heavy and thick as a warrior's, and it struck him flat on the mouth. Fancy might have regarded the act as the recrudescence of a trick in which her mailed progenitors were not unpractised. Alec fiercely started up from his re-
