l if she loved another? She said it, as if guided by
an instinct, to sound the depth of his love for her. Starting with
amazement, he looked at her, and then, divining her feeling, he only
replied by an expression of reproach, and by kissing her hands with
an habitual tenderness that had grown easy to him,--and they were
such lovely hands! But his heart told him that no spent swimmer ever
transferred more eagerly to another's arms some precious burden beneath
which he was consciously sinking, than he would yield her up to any
one whom she would consent to love, and who could be trusted with the
treasure. Until that ecstasy of release should come, he would do his
duty,--yes, his duty.

When these flushed hopes grew pale, as they soon did, he could at least
play with the wan fancies that took their place. Hour after hour,
while she lavished upon him the sweetness of her devotion, he was half
consciously shaping with his tongue some word of terrible revealing that
should divide them like a spell, if spoken, and then recalling it before
it left his lips. Daily and hourly he felt the last agony of a weak and
passionate nature,--to dream of one woman in another's arms.

She, too, watched him with an ever-increasing instinct of danger,
studied with a chilly terror the workings of his face, weighed and
reweighed his words in absence, agonized herself with new and ever
new suspicions; and then, when these had accumulated beyond endurance,
seized them convulsively and threw them all away. Then, coming back to
him with a great overwhelming ardor of affection, she poured upon him
more and more in proportion as he gave her less.

Sometimes in these moments of renewed affection he half gave words to
his remorse, accused himself before her of unnamed wrong, and besought
her to help him return to his better self. These were the most dangerous
moments of all, for such appeals made tenderness and patience appear
a duty; she must put away her doubts as sins, and hold him to her; she
must refuse to see his signs of faltering faith, or treat them as
mere symptoms of ill health. Should not a wife cling the closer to her
husband in proportion as he seemed alienated through the wanderings of
disease? And was not this her position? So she said within herself, and
meanwhile it was not hard to penetrate her changing thoughts, at least
for so keen an observer as Aunt Jane. Hope, at length, almost ceased to
speak of Malbone, and revealed her grie