His restlessness and inward struggles were making him thin and
haggard; still any fatigue was better than inaction, he thought.
Often, after a long day spent in riding over the Redmond and Wyngate
estates, he would set out again, often fasting, to walk across plowed
lands and through miry lanes to visit some sick laborer, and then sit
up half the night in his solitary study.

Years afterward he owned that he never looked back on this part of his
life without an inward shudder.

What would have become of him, he said, if the hand of Providence had
not laid him low before he had succeeded in ruining himself, body and
soul?

No one but Hugh knew how often he had yielded to the temptation to
drown his inward miseries in pernicious drugs; how in those solitary
vigils, while his innocent child-wife was sleeping peacefully like an
infant, his half-maddened brain conjured up delirious fancies that
seemed to people the dark library with haunting faces.

But he never meant to harm himself really; he would say in his sober
daylight reflections he was only so very wretched. Margaret's
influence had always kept him pure, and he was not the man to find
pleasure in any dissipation.

No, he would not harm himself; but he wanted more to do. If he could
represent his county, for example; but he had lost his seat last
election to his neighbor Colonel Dacre! If he could travel; if Fay
would only spare him! And then he shook his head as he thought of his
unborn child.

"You look so ill, Hugh," Fay would say with tears in her eyes when he
came up to wish her good-bye, "I wish you would stay with me a
little."

But Hugh would only give a forced laugh, and say that his "Wee Wifie
was becoming more fanciful than ever, and that he should not know what
to do with her if she went on like this;" and then, kissing her
hastily, and unloosening the little hands from his neck, he would go
out of the room pretending to whistle.

But one evening, when they were together in the library, he fell
asleep while she was talking to him, and looked so strange and flushed
that Fay got frightened and tried to wake him.

"Come, Hugh," she said, softly, "it is eleven o'clock, and I can not
leave you like this, and I am so tired and sleepy, dear;" and she
knelt down and put her hand under his head, and stroked back the hair
from his hot forehead. But Hugh only muttered something inaudibly, and
turned his face away.

And Fay, watching him anxiously, fel