With a powerful, a mighty effort of will, he called life, energy, courage back, and said, sternly and unfalteringly, "Don Luis Garcia, again I say, speak out! I understand you; it is I who am the apparently injured husband.

Marie! Great God of heaven! that man should dare couple her pure name with ignominy! Marie! my Marie! the seemingly guilty wife! Well, put forth your tale: I am not the man to shrink from my own words.

Speak truth, and I will hear you; and--and, if I can, not spurn you from me as a liar! Speak out!" Don Luis needed not a second bidding: he had remarked, seen, and heard quite enough the evening of Don Ferdinand's banquet, to require nothing more than the simple truth, to harrow the heart of his hearer, even while Morales disbelieved his every word.

Speciously, indeed, he turned his own mere suspicions as to Marie's unhappiness, and her early love for Arthur, into realities, founded on certain information, but with this sole exception--he told but the truth.

Without moving a muscle, without change of countenance, or uttering a syllable of rejoinder, Don Ferdinand listened to Garcia's recital, fixing his large piercing eye on his face, with a gaze that none but one so hardened in hypocrisy could have withstood.