n a few days John Lambert
would return, and then the storm must break. He was probably a stern,
jealous man, whose very dulness, once aroused, would be more formidable
than if he had possessed keener perceptions.

Still her thoughts did not dwell on Philip. He was simply a part of that
dull mass of pain that beset her and made her feel, as she had felt
when drowning, that her heart had left her breast and nothing but will
remained. She felt now, as then, the capacity to act with more than her
accustomed resolution, though all that was within her seemed boiling up
into her brain. As for Philip, all seemed a mere negation; there was a
vacuum where his place had been. At most the thought of him came to her
as some strange, vague thrill of added torture, penetrating her soul
and then passing; just as ever and anon there came the sound of the
fog-whistle on Brenton's Reef, miles away, piercing the dull air with
its shrill and desolate wail, then dying into silence.

What a hopeless cloud lay upon them all forever,--upon Kate, upon Harry,
upon their whole house! Then there was John Lambert; how could they keep
it from him? how could they tell him? Who could predict what he would
say? Would he take the worst and coarsest view of his young wife's mad
action or the mildest? Would he be strong or weak; and what would be
weakness, and what strength, in a position so strange? Would he put
Emilia from him, send her out in the world desolate, her soul stained
but by one wrong passion, yet with her reputation blighted as if there
were no good in her? Could he be asked to shield and protect her, or
what would become of her? She was legally a wife, and could only be
separated from him through convicted shame.

Then, if separated, she could only marry Philip. Hope nerved herself to
think of that, and it cost less effort than she expected.

There seemed a numbness on that side, instead of pain. But granting that
he loved Emilia ever so deeply, was he a man to surrender his life and
his ease and his fair name, in a hopeless effort to remove the ban that
the world would place on her. Hope knew he would not; knew that even the
simple-hearted and straightforward Harry would be far more capable of
such heroism than the sentimental Malbone. Here the pang suddenly struck
her; she was not so numb, after all!

As the leaves beside the window drooped motionless in the dank air, so
her mind drooped into a settled depression. She pitied herself,-