CHAPTER XXI.
A STORM BREWING.
Sir Everard Kingsland was blazing in the very hottest of the flame when he tore himself forcibly away from the artist and buried himself in his study.

The unutterable degradation of it all, the horrible humiliation that this man and his wife--his--were bound together by some mysterious secret, nearly drove him mad.
"Where there is mystery there must be guilt!" he fiercely thought.
"Nothing under heaven can make it right for a wife to have a secret from her husband.

And she knew it, and concealed it before she married me, and means to deceive me until the end.

In a week her name and that of this low-bred ruffian will be bandied together throughout the country." And then, like a man mad indeed, he tore up and down the apartment, his hands clinched, his face ghastly, his eyes bloodshot.

And then all doubts and fears were swept away, and love rushed back in an impetuous torrent, and he knew that to lose her were ten thousand times worse than death.
"My beautiful! my own! my darling! May Heaven pity us both! for be your secret what it may, I can not lose you--I can not! Life without you were tenfold worse than the bitterest death! My own poor girl! I know she suffers, too, for this miserable secret, this sin of others--for such it must be.