our courtship. There was the same protecting,
beautifully sweet, yet manly tenderness,
Sometimes I longed to be a child, to share
the caresses my boy and girl received. My
husband had left off almost all demonstrations
of affection for me, but only because I
had often manifestly shrunk from them; why,
I cannot tell. I loved him, I never ceased
loving him.

"Poor mamma is ill," Harold said
sometimes, when I closed my eyes, and my brow
contracted with the pain that so often
throbbed there now. "Go, little one, and
kiss her— very quietly."

"Must I, papa?" the little girl would
ask. "I don't want to get down."

A few words in a low voice, and then a
little soft mouth would be pressed up to my
face. Sometimes I pretended to have fallen
asleep, and not to feel the touch that thrilled
my whole being through; then the play
would cease, and my husband would draw
the children into another room.

My husband was much at home during
that miserable time. I thought it was to
keep watch over his children, and I resented
this bitterly. Could he not trust them with
me, their mother? Of what was he afraid?

Sometimes the indulgent, pitying, curious
tenderness with which my husband began
again to treat me, soothed me, and I could
lie for hours in child-like quiet, with my
head resting on his bosom. But this was not
the love and sympathy for which I thirsted,
and often my spirit rose up in arms, repelling
this condescending affection, which mocked
the love I craved. It was through the
carelessness or maliciousness of a servant that I
first heard how my husband was pitied as the
poor gentleman who had a mad wife.

"Mad! they think me mad!" I repeated
to myself.

I sent for Dr. Ryton. I cared nothing for
what he might think of me. The idea of
madness seemed to my proud, wrong-judging
spirit, to be attended with a humiliation I
would not bear. They might think me
anything but mad.

"You think me mad, and have taught my
husband to believe me so," I said, in a cold,
calm voice, when Dr. Ryton came. He
looked at me with a severely scrutinising
expression in his grey eyes as he sat down,
close by, fronting me. He waited for a
moment, as if he expected I should say more,
then answered:

"You have taught us to think you so—I
had almost said to wish to think you so.
Madness was a very gentle name to give
your malady; it was conferred in all
kindness, in all charity."

"Kindness!" I echoed. "You have taught
my husband so to mistrust me that he fears
to leave my own children in my charge; and
you talk of kindness!"

"Mrs. Warden reflect! Do you remember
when I was last sent for to attend you? Do
you mean to confess that that humiliating
wildness of passion was voluntarily
indulged?"

I felt the blood rush across my face, but I
answered as steadily as he asked:

"Certainly. At the beginning I could have
checked and controlled myself. To do so
would have given me terrible pain. It was
not worth while; it is a miserable relief to
me to give way. After the storm comes a
calm. In the weakness that follows after
my violence, my head is cooler and clearer,
and my heart quieter. Life is fainter, its
pain more endurable."

"You speak calmly enough now," Dr.
Ryton said. "Can you not see the selfishness
and wickedness of all this? Can you
not see that, if indeed you are a responsible
person—and in that light you wish me to
consider you—you are sinning most heinously:
destroying the peace of a home; wrecking
the happiness of your nobly-good husband;
alienating your children's affections from
you; ruining your own soul! By Heaven!
madam, you had better wish yourself the
maddest poor soul in Bedlam than the voluntary
abuser and destroyer you wish me to
pronounce you!"

I paused and thought; he sitting there,
stooping forward, bent his cold eyes on me
steadily. A book lay on the sofa by me. I
took it in my hand, longing to throw it in my
enemy's face, that, at least for a moment, he
might start and his gaze waver. But I
thought it very important then to restrain
myself. I only played awhile with the
leaves, and then put the book down. Doing
so, I looked up, and saw a kind of smile
gleaming on the grey face opposite to me.

"I see you can control yourself, Mrs.
Warden, and I also see the violent nature
that is in you," Dr. Ryton said.

"Nature! yes, you are right there," I
replied.

"A nature, madam, which you have
sinfully neglected to control, all the faults of
which you have cherished: You are a proud
woman; you shrink from the humiliation of
being thought mad, but you are blind to the
far worse humiliation of allowing the devil
within you to rule you."

"Go on, if you please," I said, quietly, as
he paused.

"I believe you are miserable, madam. I
think you are a servant to whom many talents
have been entrusted, and that you have not
even only buried them in the earth, but
have actively abused them. Your husband
is not a man of genius—not even a man
of great depth or sensitiveness of feeling; but
he has a true heart and a patient soul. He is
infinitely your superior. You might well fall
at his feet and pray his forgiveness, and let
him teach you to ask God's. Have you
suffered patiently, as he has done? Have
you loved in spite of wrong, as he has done?
Have you returned good for evil, as he has