Will you give him this letter
to set him against me and ruin us more--me and my children? Shall you
like to stand before your husband with these diamonds on you, and these
words of mine in his thoughts and yours? Will he think you have any
right to complain when he has made you miserable? You took him with
your eyes open. The willing wrong you have done me will be your curse."

The words had nestled their venomous life within her, and stirred
continually the vision of the scene at the Whispering Stones. That
scene was now like an accusing apparition: she dreaded that Grandcourt
should know of it--so far out of her sight now was that possibility she
had once satisfied herself with, of speaking to him about Mrs. Glasher
and her children, and making them rich amends. Any endurance seemed
easier than the mortal humiliation of confessing that she knew all
before she married him, and in marrying him had broken her word. For
the reasons by which she had justified herself when the marriage
tempted her, and all her easy arrangement of her future power over her
husband to make him do better than he might be inclined to do, were now
as futile as the burned-out lights which set off a child's pageant. Her
sense of being blameworthy was exaggerated by a dread both definite and
vague. The definite dread was lest the veil of secrecy should fall
between her and Grandcourt, and give him the right to taunt her. With
the reading of that letter had begun her husband's empire of fear.

And her husband all the while knew it. He had not, indeed, any distinct
knowledge of her broken promise, and would not have rated highly the
effect of that breach on her conscience; but he was aware not only of
what Lush had told him about the meeting at the Whispering Stones, but
also of Gwendolen's concealment as to the cause of her sudden illness.
He felt sure that Lydia had enclosed something with the diamonds, and
that this something, whatever it was, had at once created in Gwendolen
a new repulsion for him and a reason for not daring to manifest it. He
did not greatly mind, or feel as many men might have felt, that his
hopes in marriage were blighted: he had wanted to marry Gwendolen, and
he was not a man to repent. Why should a gentleman whose other
relations in life are carried on without the luxury of sympathetic
feeling, be supposed to require that kind of condiment in domestic
life? What he chiefly felt was that a change had come over the
conditio