among
us all;--you, whose wife should be the fairest, the purest, the
tenderest of us all, a flower that has yet been hardly breathed on!
While I-- Arthur," she said, "I know my duty better than that. I will
not seek an escape from my punishment in that way,--nor will I allow
you to destroy yourself. You have my word as a woman that it shall
not be so. Now I do not mind your knowing whether I love you or no."
He stood silent before her, not able for the moment to go on with his
prayer. "And now, go," she said. "God bless you, and give you some
day a fair and happy wife. And, Arthur, do not come again to me. If
you will let it be so, I shall have a delight in seeing you;--but not
if you come as you have come now. And, Arthur, spare me with papa. Do
not let him think that it is all my fault that I cannot do the thing
which he wishes." Then she left the room before he could say another
word to her.

But it was all her fault. No;--in that direction he could not spare
her. It must be told to her father, though he doubted his own power
of describing all that had been said. "Do not come again to me," she
had said. At the moment he had been left speechless; but if there was
one thing fixed in his mind, it was the determination to come again.
He was sure now, not only of love that might have sufficed,--but
of hot, passionate love. She had told him that her heart had beat
at his footsteps, and that she had trembled as she listened to his
voice;--and yet she expected that he would not come again! But there
was a violence of decision about the woman which made him dread that
he might still come in vain. She was so warped from herself by the
conviction of her great mistake, so prone to take shame to herself
for her own error, so keenly alive to the degradation to which she
had been submitted, that it might yet be impossible to teach her
that, though her husband had been vile and she mistaken, yet she had
not been soiled by his baseness.

He went at once to the old barrister's chambers and told him the
result of the meeting. "She is still a fool," said the father, not
understanding at second-hand the depths of his daughter's feeling.

"No, sir,--not that. She feels herself degraded by his degradation.
If it be possible we must save her from that."

"She did degrade herself."

"Not as she means it. She is not degraded in my eyes."

"Why should she not take the only means in her power of rescuing
herself and rescuing us all fr