made her
unable to reply.

'You said rightly,' he went on, 'that I have always been kind and
gentle. I never thought I could speak to you or feel to you in any other
way. But I have undergone too much, and you have deserted me. Surely it
was too soon to do that. So long as I endeavoured my utmost, and loved
you the same as ever, you might have remembered all you once said to me.
You might have given me help, but you haven't cared to.'

The impulses which had part in this outbreak were numerous and complex.
He felt all that he expressed, but at the same time it seemed to him
that he had the choice between two ways of uttering his emotion--the
tenderly appealing and the sternly reproachful: he took the latter
course because it was less natural to him than the former. His desire
was to impress Amy with the bitter intensity of his sufferings; pathos
and loving words seemed to have lost their power upon her, but perhaps
if he yielded to that other form of passion she would be shaken out of
her coldness. The stress of injured love is always tempted to speech
which seems its contradiction. Reardon had the strangest mixture of pain
and pleasure in flinging out these first words of wrath that he had ever
addressed to Amy; they consoled him under the humiliating sense of his
weakness, and yet he watched with dread his wife's countenance as she
listened to him. He hoped to cause her pain equal to his own, for then
it would be in his power at once to throw off this disguise and soothe
her with every softest word his heart could suggest. That she had really
ceased to love him he could not, durst not, believe; but his nature
demanded frequent assurance of affection. Amy had abandoned too soon the
caresses of their ardent time; she was absorbed in her maternity, and
thought it enough to be her husband's friend. Ashamed to make appeal
directly for the tenderness she no longer offered, he accused her of
utter indifference, of abandoning him and all but betraying him, that in
self-defence she might show what really was in her heart.

But Amy made no movement towards him.

'How can you say that I have deserted you?' she returned, with cold
indignation. 'When did I refuse to share your poverty? When did I
grumble at what we have had to go through?'

'Ever since the troubles really began you have let me know what your
thoughts were, even if you didn't speak them. You have never shared my
lot willingly. I can't recall one word of encou