ance
of redress remain for me?"

There was none, and Mr. Carlyle did not attempt to speak of any. He
offered a few kind words of sympathy, very generally expressed, and then
prepared to go out. She moved, and stood in his way.

"You will not leave until you have given me the particulars! I pray you,
do not! I came trustingly to you, hoping to know them."

"I am waited for, to keep an important engagement," he answered. "And
were my time at liberty, I should decline to tell them to you, on my
own account, as well as on yours. Lay not discourtesy to my charge, Lady
Levison. Were I to speak of the man, even to you, his name would blister
my lips."

"In every word of hate spoken by you I would sympathize; every
contemptuous expression of scorn, cast upon him from your heart, I would
join in, tenfold."

Barbara was shocked. "He is your husband, after all," she took leave to
whisper.

"My husband!" broke forth Lady Levison, in agitation, seemingly. "Yes!
there's the wrong. Why did he, knowing what he was, delude me into
becoming his wife? You ought to feel for me, Mrs. Carlyle; and you do
feel for me, for you are a wife and mother. How dare these base men
marry--take to themselves an innocent, inexperienced girl, vowing,
before God, to love and honor and cherish her? Were not his other sins
impediment enough but he must have crime, also, and woo me! He has
done me deep and irredeemable wrong, and has entailed upon his child an
inheritance of shame. What had he or I done to deserve it, I ask?"

Barbara felt half frightened at her vehemence; and Barbara might be
thankful not to understand it. All her native gentleness, all her
reticence of feeling, as a wife and a gentlewoman, had been goaded
out of her. The process had been going on for some time, but this last
revelation was the crowning point; and Alice, Lady Levison, turned round
upon the world in her helpless resentment, as any poor wife, working
in a garret, might have done. There are certain wrongs which bring out
human nature in the high-born, as well as in the low. "Still he is your
husband," was all Barbara could, with deprecation, again plead.

"He made himself my husband by deceit, and I will throw him off in the
face of day," returned Lady Levison. "There is no moral obligation why
I should not. He has worked ill and ruin--ill and ruin upon me and my
child, and the world shall never be allowed to think I have borne my
share in it. How was it you kept your