. Sir Francis no doubt had been very base, but not on that
account had his wife been less a sinner. What was it to him that Sir
Francis should be base? No vice, no lies, no cruelty on the part of
Sir Francis were anything to him. But his wife;--that she whom he
had taken to his bosom as his own, that she in whom he had believed,
she who was to be the future depository of all his secrets, his very
second self, that she, in the very moment in which he had exposed
to her the tenderness of his heart, that she should then have
entertained a confidential intercourse with such a one as Sir Francis
Geraldine, an intercourse of which she had intended that he should
know nothing,--that, that was more than he could endure. It was
this,--this feeling that he was to know nothing of it, which was too
much for him. It seemed to him that he had been selected to be a
stalking-horse for them in their intercourse. It was not that he ever
accused his wife of illicit love. He was not base enough to think
her so base as that. But there had been some cause for a mysterious
alliance as to which he had been kept in the dark. To be kept in the
dark, and by his own wife, was the one thing that was unendurable.
And then the light had been let in upon him by that letter from Sir
Francis, in which Sir Francis had offered "such courtesies as are
generally held to be pleasant in a neighbourhood!" The intention
had been that this old friendship should be renewed under his roof,
and be renewed without any information being given to him that it
had ever previously existed. This was the feeling that had made it
incumbent on him to repudiate a wife who had so treated him. This was
the feeling which forbad him to retreat from his suicidal purpose.
His wife had had a secret, a secret which it was not intended that he
should share, and her partner in the secret had been that man whom
of all men he had despised the most, and who, as he now learnt, had
been only the other day engaged to marry her. In fostering his wrath
he had declared to himself that it was but only the other day; and
he had come to think that at the very moment in which he had told
Cecilia Holt of all his own troubles she had then, even then, been
engaged to this abominable baronet. "I have got another man to offer
to marry me, and therefore our engagement, which is a trouble to us
both, may now be over." Some such communication as this had been
made, and he had been the victim of it.

And y