but
this was enough. It had broken up that confidence, unexpressed, but
always a holy principle in both, which had so long held those two souls
together, spite of everything that ought to have kept them apart, and
did keep them apart, completely as the most rigid moralist could have
demanded.

But we suffer as often for our feelings as our actions; and, in the bare
fact that a woman like Mabel Harrington--so capable of deep feeling, so
rich in all those higher qualities that ripen to perfection only in the
warm atmosphere of love--had married a man whom she never could love,
lay a bitter reason for her unhappiness; the one sin that had woven its
iron thread through what seemed to others the golden coil of her life.

Mabel saw all this; for years the knowledge of her own rash act had
coiled the snake around her heart, which was eating away its life, had
been the shadow around her footsteps which nothing could sweep away, not
even her own will. She was a slave, the slave of her own deadly sin; for
a deadly sin it is which links two unloving hearts together, even in so
brief a period of eternity as this world. And Mabel was too good, too
great, too kindly of heart to be the bond slave of one sin forever and
ever, to feel her soul eternally dragged back by the chain and ball
which she had fastened to it in one rash moment of her early youth. Had
she been otherwise, some thought of escape would have presented itself
to a mind so full of strength and vivid imagination as hers. On every
hand the law, and society itself, held out temptations, and pointed to
the way by which she might cast off her bonds, and, as thousands do,
escape the penalty of one rash act by a cowardly defiance of the laws
of God, under the mean shelter of human legislation.

In a country where venal statesmen make "marriage vows as false as
dicers' oaths," by reducing a solemn sacrament into a miserable compact,
Mabel Harrington might have escaped the evil of her own act, and taken a
dastardly refuge in the law, but the thought had never entered her mind.
It is a hard penalty for sins, which the world will not recognize as
such, when every hour calls for some atonement--when each household step
is made heavy by loveless thoughts; Mabel was conscious of her own
wrong, and even these small doling atonements never regarded by the
world, yet which tell so fearfully on the life, had been patiently
performed. She had given way to no sentimental repinings--nor