nerves, and the strain had told upon them.
She still loved her husband with a desperate
kind of love; but all its peace, all its strength,
all its frankness — and even in the evil life they
had always led it had possessed these qualities
—had vanished. She loved him now with all the
old intensity of passion, but with an element of
fierceness added to it, with a horrid craving and
fear, sometimes with a sudden repulsion, which
she rebelled against as physical cowardice,
causing her to shrink from him in the darkness,
and to shut her ears from the sound of his
breathing in his sleep. And then she would
upbraid herself fiercely, and ask herself if she,
who had given him all her life and being, who
had renounced for him — though she denied to
herself that such renunciation was any sacrifice,
for did she not love him, as happy women, the
caressed of society, do not know to love — home,
name, kindred, and God, could possibly shrink
from him now? She had not played any pretty
little game of self-deception; she had not
persuaded herself that he was other than he really
was; she did not care, she loved him, just as he
was, no better and no worse. She lived for him,
she believed in, she desired, she asked no other
life; and if a terrible anguish had come into
that life latterly, that was her share of it, her
fair share. It was not easy, for she was a
woman and weak; her nerves would thrill
sometimes, and phantoms swarm about her;
sleeplessness would wear her down, and a spell
be set upon her lips, under which they strove
vainly to curve with their old smile, and to utter
their old words of endearment and protestation;
for she scorned and hated herself for such
weakness, and could have torn her rebellious flesh
with rage, that sometimes it would creep
and turn cold when he touched her, or even
when he only spoke. She fought this false
and dastardly weakness, as she called it,
with steady bravery, and with the resolve to
conquer, which is always half a moral battle;
but she did not conquer it, she only quelled it
for a little while. It returned on occasions, and
then it tortured and appalled her even more than
when the foe had been always in position.

All such conflicts of feeling had the effect of
narrowing the sphere of her life, of concentrating
her whole attention on, and intensifying
her absorption in, her husband. A lassitude
which her own good sense told her was
dangerous began to take possession of her.
They were better off now — she did not
rightly know how, or how much, for she had
gradually lapsed from her previous customary
active overseeing of Routh's affairs, and had
been content to take money as he gave it, and
expend it as he desired, skilfully and
economically, but with an entire indifference, very
different to the cheerful, sunny household
thriftiness which had formerly been so marked
a feature in their Bohemian life, and had testified,
perhaps more strongly than any other of
its characteristics, to the utter deadness of the
woman's conscience. His comforts were as
scrupulously looked after as ever, and far
more liberally provided for; but the tasteful
care for her home, the indescribable something
which had invested their life with the charm of
a refinement contrasting strangely with its real
degradation, had vanished. Harriet's manner
was changed — changed to a quietude unnatural
to her, and peculiarly unpleasant to Routh, who
had had a scientific appreciation of the charm of
steady, business-like, calm judgment and decision
brought to bear on business matters; but
discarded, at a moment's notice, for sparkling
liveliness and a power of enjoyment which
never passed the bounds of refinement in its
demonstrativeness. "Eat, drink, and be merry"
had been their rule of life in time that seemed
strangely old to them both; and if the woman
alone had sometimes remarked that the precept
had a corollary, she did not care much about it.
"To-morrow ye die" was an assurance which
carried little terror to one absolutely without
belief in a future life, and who, in this, had
realised her sole desire, and lived every hour in
the fulness of its realisation. Stewart Routh
had never had the capacity, either of heart or
of intellect, to comprehend his wife thoroughly;
but he had loved her as much as he was capable
of loving any one, in his own way, and the
strength aud duration of the feeling had been
much increased by their perfect comradeship.
His best aid in business, his shrewd, wise
counsellor in difficulty, his good comrade in
pleasure, his sole confidant — it must be
remembered that there was no craving for respect on
the one side, no possibility of rendering it, no
power of missing it, on the other and the most
cherished wife of the most respectable and
worthy member of society might have
compared her position with that of Harriet with
considerable disadvantage on many points.

Things were, however, changed of late, and
Harriet had begun to feel, with something of
the awfully helpless, feeble foreboding with
which the victims of conscious madness foresee
the approach of the foe, that there was some
power, whose origin she did not know, whose
nature she could not discern, undermining her,
and conquering her unawares. Was it bodily
illness? She had always had unbroken health,
and was slow to detect any approach of disease.
She did not think it could be that, and conscience,
remorse, the presence, the truth, of the
supernatural components of human life, she
disbelieved in; therefore she refused to take the
possibility of their existence and their influence
into consideration. She was no longer young,
and she had suffered — yes, she had certainly
suffered a very great deal; no one could love
as she loved aud not suffer, that was all. Time
would do everything for her; things were going
well; all risk was at an end, with the procuring
of George's promise and the quieting of
George's scruples (how feeble a nature his was?,
she thought, but without the acrid scorn a
similar reflection had aroused in her husband's
mind) ; and every week of time gained without
the revival of any inquisition, was a century of
presumptive safety. Yes, now she was very