tle daughter and only child had reached the age of eight
years, their married life had been an unusually happy one. At that
period the double misfortune fell on the household, of the failure of
the wife's health, and the almost total loss of the husband's fortune;
and from that moment the domestic happiness of the married pair was
virtually at an end.

Having reached the age when men in general are readier, under the
pressure of calamity, to resign themselves than to resist, the major had
secured the little relics of his property, had retired into the country,
and had patiently taken refuge in his mechanical pursuits. A woman
nearer to him in age, or a woman with a better training and more
patience of disposition than his wife possessed, would have understood
the major's conduct, and have found consolation in the major's
submission. Mrs. Milroy found consolation in nothing. Neither nature
nor training helped her to meet resignedly the cruel calamity which had
struck at her in the bloom of womanhood and the prime of beauty. The
curse of incurable sickness blighted her at once and for life.

Suffering can, and does, develop the latent evil that there is in
humanity, as well as the latent good. The good that was in Mrs. Milroy's
nature shrank up, under that subtly deteriorating influence in which the
evil grew and flourished. Month by month, as she became the weaker
woman physically, she became the worse woman morally. All that was mean,
cruel, and false in her expanded in steady proportion to the contraction
of all that had once been generous, gentle, and true. Old suspicions
of her husband's readiness to relapse into the irregularities of his
bachelor life, which, in her healthier days of mind and body, she had
openly confessed to him--which she had always sooner or later seen to
be suspicions that he had not deserved--came back, now that sickness had
divorced her from him, in the form of that baser conjugal distrust which
keeps itself cunningly secret; which gathers together its inflammatory
particles atom by atom into a heap, and sets the slowly burning frenzy
of jealousy alight in the mind. No proof of her husband's blameless
and patient life that could now be shown to Mrs. Milroy; no appeal that
could be made to her respect for herself, or for her child growing up
to womanhood, availed to dissipate the terrible delusion born of her
hopeless illness, and growing steadily with its growth. Like all other
madness, it ha