that it was a pity I
made so poor a figure as an heir and a bridegroom. The nervous fatigue
of this existence, the insincerities and platitudes which I had to live
through twice over--through my inner and outward sense--would have been
maddening to me, if I had not had that sort of intoxicated callousness
which came from the delights of a first passion. A bride and bridegroom,
surrounded by all the appliances of wealth, hurried through the day by
the whirl of society, filling their solitary moments with
hastily-snatched caresses, are prepared for their future life together as
the novice is prepared for the cloister--by experiencing its utmost
contrast.

Through all these crowded excited months, Bertha's inward self remained
shrouded from me, and I still read her thoughts only through the language
of her lips and demeanour: I had still the human interest of wondering
whether what I did and said pleased her, of longing to hear a word of
affection, of giving a delicious exaggeration of meaning to her smile.
But I was conscious of a growing difference in her manner towards me;
sometimes strong enough to be called haughty coldness, cutting and
chilling me as the hail had done that came across the sunshine on our
marriage morning; sometimes only perceptible in the dexterous avoidance
of a _tete-a-tete_ walk or dinner to which I had been looking forward. I
had been deeply pained by this--had even felt a sort of crushing of the
heart, from the sense that my brief day of happiness was near its
setting; but still I remained dependent on Bertha, eager for the last
rays of a bliss that would soon be gone for ever, hoping and watching for
some after-glow more beautiful from the impending night.

I remember--how should I not remember?--the time when that dependence and
hope utterly left me, when the sadness I had felt in Bertha's growing
estrangement became a joy that I looked back upon with longing as a man
might look back on the last pains in a paralysed limb. It was just after
the close of my father's last illness, which had necessarily withdrawn us
from society and thrown us more on each other. It was the evening of
father's death. On that evening the veil which had shrouded Bertha's
soul from me--had made me find in her alone among my fellow-beings the
blessed possibility of mystery, and doubt, and expectation--was first
withdrawn. Perhaps it was the first day since the beginning of my
passion for her, in which that pass