ve way, fell into tears, hysteric sobbings,
convulsions so violent as for a time to take the appearance of
epileptic fits, and was at last exhausted and, happily for herself,
unconscious.

After that she was ill for many weeks,--so ill that at times both
her father and her brother thought that she would die. When the
first month or six weeks had passed by she would often speak of her
husband, especially to her father, and always speaking of him as
though she had brought him to his untimely fate. Nor could she endure
at this time that her father should say a word against him, even when
she obliged the old man to speak of one whose conduct had been so
infamous. It had all been her doing! Had she not married him there
would have been no misfortune! She did not say that he had been
noble, true, or honest,--but she asserted that all the evils which
had come upon him had been produced by herself. "My dear," her father
said to her one evening, "it is a matter which we cannot forget, but
on which it is well that we should be silent."

"I shall always know what that silence means," she replied.

"It will never mean condemnation of you by me," said he.

"But I have destroyed your life,--and his. I know I ought not to have
married him, because you bade me not. And I know that I should have
been gentler with him, and more obedient, when I was his wife. I
sometimes wish that I were a Catholic, and that I could go into a
convent, and bury it all amidst sackcloths and ashes."

"That would not bury it," said her father.

"But I should at least be buried. If I were out of sight, you might
forget it all."

She once stirred Everett up to speak more plainly than her father
ever dared to do, and then also she herself used language that was
very plain. "My darling," said her brother once, when she had been
trying to make out that her husband had been more sinned against than
sinning,--"he was a bad man. It is better that the truth should be
told."

"And who is a good man?" she said, raising herself in her bed and
looking him full in the face with her deep-sunken eyes. "If there be
any truth in our religion, are we not all bad? Who is to tell the
shades of difference in badness? He was not a drunkard, or a gambler.
Through it all he was true to his wife." She, poor creature, was of
course ignorant of that little scene in the little street near May
Fair, in which Lopez had offered to carry Lizzie Eustace away with
him to Guatemala.