m--in nine cases out of ten she gives
him his title.

I cannot find that his habits and opinions have changed and coloured
hers in any single particular. The usual moral transformation which is
insensibly wrought in a young, fresh, sensitive woman by her marriage,
seems never to have taken place in Laura. She writes of her own
thoughts and impressions, amid all the wonders she has seen, exactly as
she might have written to some one else, if I had been travelling with
her instead of her husband. I see no betrayal anywhere of sympathy of
any kind existing between them. Even when she wanders from the subject
of her travels, and occupies herself with the prospects that await her
in England, her speculations are busied with her future as my sister,
and persistently neglect to notice her future as Sir Percival's wife.
In all this there is no undertone of complaint to warn me that she is
absolutely unhappy in her married life. The impression I have derived
from our correspondence does not, thank God, lead me to any such
distressing conclusion as that. I only see a sad torpor, an
unchangeable indifference, when I turn my mind from her in the old
character of a sister, and look at her, through the medium of her
letters, in the new character of a wife. In other words, it is always
Laura Fairlie who has been writing to me for the last six months, and
never Lady Glyde.

The strange silence which she maintains on the subject of her husband's
character and conduct, she preserves with almost equal resolution in
the few references which her later letters contain to the name of her
husband's bosom friend, Count Fosco.

For some unexplained reason the Count and his wife appear to have
changed their plans abruptly, at the end of last autumn, and to have
gone to Vienna instead of going to Rome, at which latter place Sir
Percival had expected to find them when he left England. They only
quitted Vienna in the spring, and travelled as far as the Tyrol to meet
the bride and bridegroom on their homeward journey. Laura writes
readily enough about the meeting with Madame Fosco, and assures me that
she has found her aunt so much changed for the better--so much quieter,
and so much more sensible as a wife than she was as a single
woman--that I shall hardly know her again when I see her here. But on
the subject of Count Fosco (who interests me infinitely more than his
wife), Laura is provokingly circumspect and silent. She only says that