room again.

All this was told me long after by Tom himself. Tom believed, or said
he believed, that she was only sounding him, to see what his intentions
were in case of a meeting with George Hawker. I would not for the world
have had him suppose I disagreed with him; but I myself take another
and darker interpretation of her strange words that night. I think,
that she, never a very strong-minded person, and now, grown quite
desperate from terror, actually contemplated her husband's death with
complacency, nay, hoped, in her secret heart, that one mad struggle
between him and Tom might end the matter for ever, and leave her a free
woman. I may do her injustice, but I think I do not. One never knows
what a woman of this kind, with strong passions and a not over-strong
intellect, may be driven to. I knew her for forty years, and loved her
for twenty. I knew in spite of all her selfishness and violence that
there were many good, nay, noble points in her character; but I cannot
disguise from myself that that night's conversation with Tom showed me
a darker point in her character than I knew of before. Let us forget
it. I would wish to have none but kindly recollections of the woman I
loved so truly and so long.

For the secret must be told sooner or later,--I loved her before any of
them. Before James Stockbridge, before George Hawker, before Thomas
Troubridge, and I loved her more deeply and more truly than any of
them. But the last remnant of that love departed from my heart twenty
years ago, and that is why I can write of her so calmly now, and that
is the reason, too, why I remain an old bachelor to this day.

Chapter XXXIX

THE LAST GLEAM BEFORE THE STORM.

But with us, who were staying down at Major Buckley's, a fortnight
passed on so pleasantly that the horror of poor Lee's murder had begun
to wear off, and we were getting once more as merry and careless as
though we were living in the old times of profound peace. Sometimes we
would think of poor Mary Hawker, at her lonely watch up at the forest
station; but that or any other unpleasant subject was soon driven out
of our heads by Captain Desborough, who had come back with six
troopers, declared the country in a state of siege, proclaimed martial
law, and kept us all laughing and amused from daylight to dark.

Captain Brentwood and his daughter Alice (the transcendently
beautiful!) had come up, and were staying there. Jim and his friend
Halbert were st