with the fair young
daughter of a noble house. No one talked of Mrs. Glasher now, any more
than they talked of the victim in a trial for manslaughter ten years
before: she was a lost vessel after whom nobody would send out an
expedition of search; but Grandcourt was seen in harbor with his colors
flying, registered as seaworthy as ever.

Yet, in fact, Grandcourt had never disentangled himself from Mrs.
Glasher. His passion for her had been the strongest and most lasting he
had ever known; and though it was now as dead as the music of a cracked
flute, it had left a certain dull disposedness, which, on the death of
her husband three years before, had prompted in him a vacillating
notion of marrying her, in accordance with the understanding often
expressed between them during the days of his first ardor. At that
early time Grandcourt would willingly have paid for the freedom to be
won by a divorce; but the husband would not oblige him, not wanting to
be married again himself, and not wishing to have his domestic habits
printed in evidence.

The altered poise which the years had brought in Mrs. Glasher was just
the reverse. At first she was comparatively careless about the
possibility of marriage. It was enough that she had escaped from a
disagreeable husband and found a sort of bliss with a lover who had
completely fascinated her--young, handsome, amorous, and living in the
best style, with equipage and conversation of the kind to be expected
in young men of fortune who have seen everything. She was an
impassioned, vivacious woman, fond of adoration, exasperated by five
years of marital rudeness; and the sense of release was so strong upon
her that it stilled anxiety for more than she actually enjoyed. An
equivocal position was of no importance to her then; she had no envy
for the honors of a dull, disregarded wife: the one spot which spoiled
her vision of her new pleasant world, was the sense that she left her
three-year-old boy, who died two years afterward, and whose first tones
saying "mamma" retained a difference from those of the children that
came after. But now the years had brought many changes besides those in
the contour of her cheek and throat; and that Grandcourt should marry
her had become her dominant desire. The equivocal position which she
had not minded about for herself was now telling upon her through her
children, whom she loved with a devotion charged with the added passion
of atonement. She had no