connives at his own dishonor."

"Woman, are you mad!--but no matter. I am too weary for much anger. You
should have remembered of old that I hate scenes. This has been gotten
up with too much intensity. I am tired of it."

"I see, I see!" replied the woman, resuming her slave-like submission.
"You are tired, with no one to care about it. Let me serve you once
more."

Zillah went to a marble console in another part of the room, poured out
a glass of wine, and, sinking gently at his feet, presented it after the
Oriental fashion which he had taught her years before.

He took the wine and drank it off, dropping his hand carelessly upon her
shoulder as he returned the glass. The woman sat gazing into his face,
her brow knitted, and her eyes full of thought.

"Then you shrink from a public exposure in this matter?" she said at
last, bending her head on one side and touching his hand with her lips,
which fell upon it cold as ice, so deep was the craft and so cruel was
the passion that prompted this caress.

"I shrink from purchasing revenge at the cost of everything that renders
life worth having. Once for all, Zillah, to quarrel with James
Harrington is to give up all that I enjoy. Of my wife's fortune, nothing
but this old mansion, and some fragments of real estate, remain. My
first wife, as you know, left every dollar of her property to James,
else the marriage which has created all this turmoil would never have
taken place. Up to this hour, the young man has given me almost the
entire control of his income. Mrs. Harrington has no idea that her
property has not always supplied our income. To assail them, is to
expose my own losses at the gambling-table--both while I was her
guardian and her husband--I only wish the accursed book had never
reached my hands. So long as she was acknowledged the most correct and
splendid woman in society, what was her heart and its secrets to me? I
tell you, I am tied to silence in this matter, and your interference can
but annoy me."

"Not if I point out the way by which the vengeance you pant for may
enrich yourself," said the woman, arousing from her thoughtfulness.

"Oh, that would be a discovery, indeed."

"James Harrington loves the lady."

"I am not so sure of that; but, suppose it so, what then?"

"Legal separations are easy in this country. Let her go to one of those
States where incompatibility of temper, absence, or caprice, is deemed
sufficient reason for divorce. Thi