endured, it might have been possible that she
should do more for him even than she yet had done.

CHAPTER LXV

"I hate her!"

Lady Laura Kennedy had been allowed to take no active part in the
manifestations of friendship which at this time were made on behalf
of Phineas Finn. She had, indeed, gone to him in his prison, and made
daily efforts to administer to his comfort; but she could not go up
into the Court and speak for him. And now this other woman, whom she
hated, would have the glory of his deliverance! She already began
to see a fate before her, which would make even her past misery as
nothing to that which was to come. She was a widow,--not yet two
months a widow; and though she did not and could not mourn the death
of a husband as do other widows,--though she could not sorrow in
her heart for a man whom she had never loved, and from whom she had
been separated during half her married life,--yet the fact of her
widowhood and the circumstances of her weeds were heavy on her. That
she loved this man, Phineas Finn, with a passionate devotion of which
the other woman could know nothing she was quite sure. Love him! Had
she not been true to him and to his interests from the very first
day in which he had come among them in London, with almost more than
a woman's truth? She knew and recalled to her memory over and over
again her own one great sin,--the fault of her life. When she was, as
regarded her own means, a poor woman, she had refused to be this poor
man's wife, and had given her hand to a rich suitor. But she had done
this with a conviction that she could so best serve the interests of
the man in regard to whom she had promised herself that her feeling
should henceforth be one of simple and purest friendship. She had
made a great effort to carry out that intention, but the effort had
been futile. She had striven to do her duty to a husband whom she
disliked,--but even in that she had failed. At one time she had been
persistent in her intercourse with Phineas Finn, and at another had
resolved that she would not see him. She had been madly angry with
him when he came to her with the story of his love for another woman,
and had madly shown her anger; but yet she had striven to get for him
the wife he wanted, though in doing so she would have abandoned one
of the dearest purposes of her life. She had moved heaven and earth
for him,--her heaven and earth,--when there was danger that he would
lose his se