hat she pretended--the other feeling was probably far more of
a reality. Before the year was out she had renewed her intimacy with my
rival--a compatriot of her own. You will suppose that we parted at once
when things came to this pass; but for some time I had only suspicion to
go upon. I knew that she was often away from home, and that she had even
been to places of amusement in this man's company; but when I spoke to
her she either lulled my uneasiness or pretended to be outraged by my
jealousy. Soon there was no bond of respect left between us; but as a
last chance, I resolved to break up our little home in England, and go
abroad. I could no longer endure my life with her. She had ceased to be
a wife in any worthy sense of the word, and was now my worst enemy, an
object of loathing rather than of love. Still, I remember that I had a
gleam of hope when I took her on the Continent, thinking it just
possible that by removing her from her old associations, I might win her
back to a sense of duty. I would have borne her frivolity; I would have
endured to be bound for life to a doll or a log, if only she could have
been outwardly faithful.

"Well, to make a long story short, we had not been abroad more than six
weeks when this man I have told you about made his appearance on the
scene. She must have written to him and asked him to come, at the very
moment when she was cheating me with a show of reviving affection; and I
own that the meeting of these two one day in the hotel gardens at
Aix-les-Bains drove me into a fit of temporary madness. We quarrelled; I
sent him a challenge, and we fought. He was not much hurt, and I escaped
untouched. The man disappeared, and I have never seen him from that day
to this, but I have some reason to think that he is dead."

He paused for a moment or two; and Lettice could not refrain from
uttering the words, "Your wife?" in a tone of painful interest.

"My wife?" he repeated slowly. "Ah yes, my wife. Well, after a stormy
scene with her, she became quiet and civil. She even seemed anxious to
please me, and to set my mind at rest. But she was merely hatching her
last plot against me, and I was as great a fool and dupe at this moment
as I had ever been before."

And then, with averted face, he told the story of his last interview
with her on the hills beyond Culoz. "I will not repeat anything she
said," he went on--it was his sole reservation--"although some of her
sentences are burned int