, or rather Providence, took the reins from the weak,
passionate hands that were so unfit to hold them, and threw him back,
helpless and baffled, on his bed of pain; there to learn, week by
week, through weary sickness and still more weary convalescence, the
lesson that only suffering could teach him--that it were well to
forgive others their sins, even as he hoped his might be forgiven.

And yet he learned another thing, as his anger slowly burned itself
out and only profound wretchedness and intolerable suspense remained
as to his wife's fate--something that startled him with a sense of
sweetness, and yet stung him with infinite pain; when the haunting
presence of his lost wife seemed ever with him, and would not let him
rest; when his remorse was terrible; and when he would have given up
all he had in the world just to hear her say in her low, fond voice,
that she forgave him all.

For he knew now that he had wronged her, and that his neglect and
coldness had driven her from her home.

The uncertainty of her fate sometimes nearly drove him wild. How could
she have laid her plans so accurately that no traces of her or the
child could be found? Could evil have befallen them? God help him if a
hair of those innocent heads had been touched. In his weakness he
could not always control the horrible imaginations that beset him.
Often he would wake from some ghastly dream and lie till dawn, unable
to shake off his deadly terror. Then all of a sudden he would remember
that hasty postscript, "Do not be anxious about me. I am going to some
kind people who will be good to me and the boy;" and he would fall
asleep again while vainly trying to recall if he had ever heard Fay
speak of any friends of her childhood. But though Erle and Miss
Mordaunt tried to help him, no name occurred to any of them.

It was an added burden that Erle could not come to him; but there was
trouble at Belgrave House, and the shadows were closing round it. Erle
could not leave his uncle, but he wrote very kindly to poor
conscience-stricken Hugh, and said all he could to comfort him.

It was in those hours of dreary helplessness that Hugh learned to miss
his Wee Wifie. In those long summer afternoons, while his foreign
nurse nodded drowsily before him, and the hot air crept sluggishly in
at the open window, how he longed for the small cool hand that used to
be laid so softly on his temples, or put the drink to his parched lips
before they could frame