the purest
resolve of an honest nature afforded her many pleas, and at length she
believed she had finally put it down. She had argued that, from the
opinions themselves of Faber, the thing could not consistently fail to
be as no thing to him. Even were she mistaken in this conclusion, it
would be to wrong his large nature, his generous love, his unselfish
regard, his tender pitifulness, to fail of putting her silent trust in
him. Besides, had she not read in the newspapers the utterance of a
certain worshipful judge on the bench that no man had any thing to do
with his wife's ante-nuptial history? The contract then was certainly
not retrospective. What in her remained unsatisfied after all her
arguments, reasons, and appeals to common sense and consequences, she
strove to strangle, and thought, hoped, she had succeeded. She willed
her will, made up her mind, yielded to Paul's solicitations, and put the
whole painful thing away from her.

The step taken, the marriage over, nothing could any more affect either
fact. Only, unfortunately for the satisfaction and repose she had
desired and expected, her love to her husband had gone on growing after
they were married. True she sometimes fancied it otherwise, but while
the petals of the rose were falling, its capsule was filling; and
notwithstanding the opposite tendency of the deoxygenated atmosphere in
which their thoughts moved, she had begun already to long after an
absolute union with him. But this growth of her love, and aspiration
after its perfection, although at first they covered what was gone by
with a deepening mist of apparent oblivion, were all the time bringing
it closer to her consciousness--out of the far into the near. And now
suddenly that shape she knew of, lying in the bottom of the darkest pool
of the stagnant Past, had been stung into life by a wind of words that
swept through Nestley chapel, had stretched up a hideous neck and
threatening head from the deep, and was staring at her with sodden eyes:
henceforth she knew that the hideous Fact had its appointed place
between her and her beautiful Paul, the demon of the gulfy cleft that
parted them.

The moment she spoke in reply to his greeting her husband also felt
something dividing them, but had no presentiment of its being any thing
of import.

"You are over-tired, my love," he said, and taking her hand, felt her
pulse. It was feeble and frequent.

"What have they been doing to you, my darling?" h