ss and agony. I have seen your hope die, and your terror
grow; and do I not know what your fear is?--Suicide! Yes, let
me speak the word at once, let me dive into your inmost
thoughts, and let me carry consolation even into that
extremity of misery. Who can declare the point where despair
becomes _madness?_ Who shall judge? Who shall condemn? Who can
tell the secret things of the soul save the God who made it?
He has set no limits to our prayers; and shall we say to His
mercy, so far shalt thou go and no further?"

They knelt together, those two women; they poured forth their
souls in prayer, and when they rose from their knees, and the
elder of them leant her forehead against the breast of the
younger and wept in silence, she blessed her in her heart; and
she was right to bless her, for nobly and tenderly had Alice
Lovell borne her part through the heavy trials that had
assailed her. We heard of her last on the bed of sickness, and
death was drawing near to her; but youth, and strength of body
and mind carried her through, and when she rose from her couch
of weakness and of pain, it was to hurry to the bed-side of
the husband who had forsaken her, and who, after some days of
agonised search after the victim of his relentless passion,
maddened by the conviction that he had destroyed her, and
haunted by an indescribable remorse, had lost in a brain fever
all consciousness save of some intolerable anguish, and of
that endless remorse. For many days he hovered between life
and death, while his pale wife stood by his side and held his
burning hand in hers; even while he raved in dreadful delirium
of his love and his despair, and with frantic cries called
upon the grave to give up its dead. She was indeed a
ministering angel in that house of mourning, for there was
another fierce but now subdued spirit, who without daring to
approach the bed of suffering, was undergoing all the anguish
of the blow she had struck, and which had recoiled upon
herself. It was a fearful sight to see that old woman crying
like a child over the ruin she had made, wringing her hands in
despair, and with straining eyes and blanched cheeks,
listening at the door of the room where the being, whom she
had nursed as a child, and idolised as a man, whose passions
she had fostered, whose life she had saved and embittered, to
whom she had confided her child, and whom she had at last
ruined by her blind and furious revenge, was raving, cursing,
and dyi