uneasy symptoms.
There was also a slight suggestion of an habitual toleration, as if
even the seclusion of Todos Santos had not been entirely free from the
invasion of the primal passion.

Hurlstone waited for an instant, but then went on rapidly.

"It is of a woman, who has cursed my life, blasted my prospects, and
ruined my youth; a woman who gained my early affection only to blight
and wither it; a woman who should be nearer to me and dearer than all
else, and yet who is further than the uttermost depths of hell from me
in sympathy or feeling; a woman that I should cleave to, but from whom
I have been flying, ready to face shame, disgrace, oblivion, even that
death which alone can part us: for that woman is--my wife."

He stopped, out of breath, with fixed eyes and a rigid mouth. Father
Esteban drew a snuff-box from his pocket, and a large handkerchief.
After blowing his nose violently, he took a pinch of snuff, wiped his
lip, and replaced the box.

"A bad habit, my son," he said apologetically, "but an old man's
weakness. Go on."

"I met her first five years ago--the wife of another man. Don't misjudge
me, it was no lawless passion; it was a friendship, I believed, due to
her intellectual qualities as much as to her womanly fascinations; for I
was a young student, lodging in the same house with her, in an academic
town. Before I ever spoke to her of love, she had confided to me her own
unhappiness--the uncongeniality of her married life, the harshness, and
even brutality, of her husband. Even a man less in love than I was could
have seen the truth of this--the contrast of the coarse, sensual, and
vulgar man with an apparently refined and intelligent woman; but any one
else except myself would have suspected that such a union was not
merely a sacrifice of the woman. I believed her. It was not until long
afterwards that I learned that her marriage had been a condonation of
her youthful errors by a complaisant bridegroom; that her character
had been saved by a union that was a mutual concession. But I loved her
madly; and when she finally got a divorce from her uncongenial husband,
I believed it less an expression of her love for me than an act of
justice. I did not know at the time that they had arranged the divorce
together, as they had arranged their marriage, by equal concessions.

"I was the only son of a widowed mother, whose instincts were from
the first opposed to my friendship with this woman, and what s