e notable in the eyes of the gazers than the rest--Richard Hare the
younger.

Lady Isabel was ill. Ill in mind, and ominously ill in body. She kept
her room, and Joyce attended on her. The household set down madame's
illness to the fatigue of having attended upon Master William; it was
not thought of seriously by any one, especially as she declined to see a
doctor. All her thoughts now were directed to the getting away from East
Lynne, for it would never do to remain there to die; and she knew that
death was on his way to her, and that no human power or skill--not all
the faculty combined--could turn him back again. The excessive dread of
detection was not upon her as it had been formerly. I mean she did not
dread the consequences so much, if detection came. In nearing the grave,
all fears and hopes, of whatever nature, relating to this world, lose
their force, and fears or hopes regarding the next world take their
place. Our petty feelings here are lost in the greater.

In returning to East Lynne, Lady Isabel had entered upon a daring act,
and she found, in the working, that neither strength nor spirit was
equal to it. Human passions and tempers were brought with us into this
world, and they can only quit us when we bid it farewell, to enter upon
immortality in the next.

When Lady Isabel was Mr. Carlyle's wife, she had never wholly loved him.
The very utmost homage that esteem, admiration, affection could give was
his, but that mysterious passion called by the name of love, and which,
as I truly and heartily believe, cannot, in its refined etherealism,
be known to many of us, had not been given to him. It was now. From the
very night she came back to East Lynne, her love for Mr. Carlyle had
burst forth with an intensity never before felt. It had been smoldering
almost ever since she quitted him. "Reprehensible!" groans a moralist.
Very. Everybody knows that, as Afy would say. But her heart, you see,
had _not_ done with human passions, and they work ill, and contrariness,
let the word stand, critic, if you please, and precisely everything they
should not.

I shall get in for it, I fear, if I attempt to defend her. But it was
not exactly the same thing, as though she suffered herself to fall in
love with somebody else's husband. Nobody would defend that. We have not
turned Mormons yet, and the world does not walk upon its head. But this
was a peculiar case. She, poor thing, almost regarded Mr. Carlyle as
_her_ husba