e of
excitement completely overpowered her customary quiet respect and plain
good sense. "And, ma'am, I am glad that you have come up; for what I was
about to say to my master I would prefer to say in your presence. When
my lady is brought into this house, and laid before us dead, what
will your feelings be? My master has done his duty by her in love; but
you--you have made her life a misery. Yes, ma'am, you have."

"Hoity-toity!" muttered Miss Carlyle, staring at Joyce in consternation.
"What is all this? Where's my lady?"

"She has gone and taken the life that was not hers to take," sobbed
Joyce, "and I say she has been driven to it. She has not been allowed to
indulge a will of her own, poor thing, since she came to East Lynne; in
her own house she has been less free than either of her servants. You
have curbed her, ma'am, and snapped at her, and you made her feel that
she was but a slave to your caprices and temper. All these years she has
been crossed and put upon; everything, in short, but beaten--ma'am, you
know she has--and has borne it all in silence, like a patient angel,
never, as I believe, complaining to master; he can say whether she has
or not. We all loved her, we all felt for her; and my master's heart
would have bled had he suspected what she had to put up with day after
day, and year after year."

Miss Carlyle's tongue was glued to her mouth. Her brother, confounded at
the rapid words, could scarcely gather in their sense.

"What is it that you are saying, Joyce?" he asked, in a low tone. "I do
not understand."

"I have longed to say it to you many a hundred times, sir; but it is
right that you should hear it, now things have come to this dreadful
ending. Since the very night Lady Isabel came home here, your wife, she
had been taunted with the cost she has brought to East Lynne and to you.
If she wanted but the simplest thing, she was forbidden to have it, and
told that she was bringing her husband to poverty. For this very dinner
party that she went to to-night she wished for a new dress, and your
cruel words, ma'am, forbade her having it. She ordered a new frock for
Miss Isabel, and you countermanded it. You have told her that master
worked like a dog to support her extravagances, when you know that she
never was extravagant; that none were less inclined to go beyond proper
limits than she. I have seen her, ma'am, come away from your reproaches
with the tears in her eyes, and her hands meekly c