vision too torturing even for
their brave penetrating gaze, and in her rigid whiteness she seemed
some unearthly creature, who had done for ever with feverish life and
the frail toys of time.

Raising her arms above her head, she rested her clasped hands upon
her brow, and in a low, strangely quiet tone her words dropped like
icicles.

"It was a groundless fear, that when the long-sought opportunity came
my weak womanish nature would betray me, and I should fail, break
down utterly under the crushing weight of tender memories, sacred
associations. What are they?

"Three dreamy weeks of delirious wifehood, balanced by thirteen years
of toil, aspersion, hatred, persecution; goaded by want, pursued
ceaselessly by the scorpion scourge whose slanderous lash coiled ever
after my name, my reputation. Three weeks a bride,--unrecognized
as such even then,--twelve years an outcast,--repudiated,
insulted,--mother and child, denied, derided,--cast off as a
serpent's skin!--Ah, memory! thou hast no charm to stir the blackened
ashes in a heart extinguished by the steady sleet of a husband's
repudiation. When love is dead, and regret is decently buried, and
the song of hope is hushed for ever, then revenge mounts the chariot
and gathers the reins in her hands of steel; and beyond the writhing
hearts whose blood dyes her rushing wheels sees only the goal. Some
wise anatomists of that frail yet invincible sphinx--woman's nature,
babble of one weighty fact, one conquering law,--that only the
mother-joy, the mother-love, fully unseals the slumbering sweetness
and latent tenderness of her being; for me, maternity opened the
sluices of a sea of hate and gall. Had I never felt the velvet touch
of tiny fingers on my cheek, a husband's base desertion might in time
have been forgiven, possibly at least, forgotten; but the first wail
from my baby's lips awoke the wolf in me. My wrongs might slumber
till that last assize, when the pitying eyes of Christ sum up the
record, but hers--have made a hungry panther of my soul. Come,
memory, unlock your treasure house, uncoil your spells, chant all
your witching strains, and let us see whether the towers of _Notre
Dame_ will not tremble and dissolve as soon as I?"

Bending to a trunk near her chair, she unlocked it, and taking out a
_papier-mache_ box, opened it with a small key that hung from her
watch chain, and placed it on the table before her, where she had
thrown the unread letters. Leaning