necessarily come; meanwhile, she watched, and
waited, and suffered.

How she suffered in every hour of her life!
Yet there was a kind of dulness over Harriet,
too. She recurred little to the past in point
of feeling; she thought over it, indeed, in aid
of the action of her reason and her will, but she
did not recal it with the keenness either of acute
grief for its vanished happiness, such as it had
been, or of remorse and terror for its deep and
desperate guilt. The burthen of the day was
enough now for this woman, whose strength had
lasted so long, endured so much, and given
way so suddenly.

But time was marching on. The inevitable
end drawing near, and Harriet had been utterly
unprepared for the second shock, the second
unexpected event which had befallen. She had
opened George Dallas's letter with the Paris
postmark almost without an apprehension. The
time for the thing she feared had not yet come;
and here was a thing she had never feared, a
possibility which had never presented itself to
her imagination, brought at once fully before
her. She had done this thing. One moment's
want of caution, in the midst of a scene in
which her nerves had been strung to their highest
tension, and this had been the result. Had no
other clue existed, these few lines of writing
would furnish one leading unerringly to discovery.
Supposing no other clue to exist, and
Routh to pretend to inability to identify the
writing, there were several common acquaintances
of Dallas and Deane who could identify it,
and render a refusal the most dangerous step
which Routh could take.

She sat for several minutes perfectly still,
her face colourless as marble, and her blue eyes
fixed with a painful expression of terror, under
the shock of this new discovery. She had had
no worse apprehension than that the letter
would announce the day of George's intended
return, and for that she was prepared; but
this! It was too much for her, and the first
words she uttered showed that her mind had
lost its strict faculty of reasoning: they broke
from her with a groan:

"I—I it is who have destroyed him!"

But, even now, weakness and exaggeration
had no long duration in Harriet Routh's mind.
By degrees she saw this in its true light, an
alarming, a terrible coincidence indeed, an
addition to the danger of their position, but
not necessarily a fatal catastrophe. Then she
saw new light, she caught at a new idea, a
fresh, bright hope. This would avail with
Routh; this would drive away his irresolution;
this would really inspire him with the true
conviction of their danger; this, which would
throw the whole burthen of identification upon
him; this, which would establish a strong and
intimate link between him and the dead man;
for the "articles to be purchased" named in
the memorandum of which George had sent
her a copy were simply shares in companies,
with every one of which Stewart Routh was
connected. Only George's ignorance of such
matters had prevented his recognising the
meaning of the memorandum.

And now Harriet rose; and as she paced the
room, the colour came back to her cheek, the
light came back to her eyes. A new life and
fresh energy seemed to spring up within her,
and she grasped George's letter in her hand,
and struck it against her bosom with an action
of the hand and a responsive movement of the
breast which was almost triumphant. This
thing which she had done, which had looked
like ruin, would be her way of escape.

Routh's refusal to return home immediately
annoyed, puzzled, and disheartened her. Why
was he so hard to move, so difficult to convince,
so insensible to danger? His plea was
business; if this business was what she hoped
and believed it to be, that of preparation, he
should have come home to learn the new and
urgent need for its expedition. Why was he so
hard to her? Why had he no thought for her
wishes, no compassion on her suspense? Harriet
could not but ask herself that, though she
strove against the deadly suffering the answer
brought her.

Thus the time wore on drearily, until Harriet
carelessly took from the table the slip of paper
which contained a whole revelation for her.

Of the hours which succeeded she could not
have given an account herself. How the fury
of jealousy, of love betrayed, of faith violated,
was reawakened within her, and inflamed to the
wildest and most desperate pitch; how she
writhed under the shame and the scorn which
her husband's baseness forced her to feel. She
had had profoundest pity, readiest help, for the
criminal; but for this pitiful, cowardly, cruel
liar nothing but contempt—nothing! Ah,
yes, something more, and that made it all the
harder—contempt and love.

The woman was here, then—here, in London,
on the spot to ruin him, lured hither by him.
His false heart planned; his guilty hands dug
the pit into which he was to fall; and now his
feet were close upon the brink. This rendered
him deaf and blind; for this he had basely
deceived her, his best, his only friend; for this he
had come to regard and treat her as his enemy;
and now Harriet had to make a desperate effort
indeed to rally all her strength and courage.
She had to put the suffering aside, to let all her
hopes go, to face a new and almost desperate
condition of affairs, and to think how he was to
be saved. It must be in spite of himself. This
time, it must be in defiance of himself.

She had passed through a long period of
suffering—if time is to be measured by pain—
before Routh came home. She had not nearly
thought it out; she had only reached a resolution
to be patient and peaceful, and to conceal
her knowledge of his treachery if any effort
could give her the strength to do so, when she
heard his key in the lock, and the next moment
his hand on the door-handle.

There was confusion in the expression of
Routh's shifty black eyes, some embarrassment
in the tone of his voice. They were slight;