could not have cut short without actual violence.

He stood proudly enduring it, waiting for the moment when what seemed
to him an outbreak of mania should have spent itself. But suddenly he
caught Catherine's name coupled with some contemptuous epithet or other,
and his self-control failed him. With flashing eyes he went close up to
her and took her wrists in a grip of iron.

'You shall not,' he said; beside himself, 'You shall not! What have I
done--what has she done--that you should allow yourself such words? My
poor wife!'

A passionate flood of self-reproachful love was on his lips. He choked
it back. It was desecration that her name should be mentioned in that
room. But he dropped the hand he held. The fierceness died out of his
eyes. His companion stood beside him panting, breathless, afraid.

'Thank God,' he said slowly, 'thank God for yourself and me that I love
my wife! I am not worthy of her--doubly unworthy, since it has been
possible for any human being to suspect for one instant that I was
ungrateful for the blessing of her love, that I could ever forget and
dishonor her! But worthy or not----No!--no matter! Madame de Netteville,
let me go, and forget that such a person exists.'

She looked at him steadily for a moment, at the stern manliness of the
face which seemed in this half-hour to have grown older, at the attitude
with its mingled dignity and appeal. In that second she realized what
she had done and what she had forfeited; she measured the gulf between
herself and the man before her. But she did not flinch. Still holding
him, as it were, with menacing defiant eyes, she moved aside, she, waved
her hand with a contemptuous gesture of dismissal. He bowed, passed her,
and the door shut.

For nearly an hour afterward Elsmere wandered blindly and aimlessly
through the darkness and silence of the park.

The sensitive optimist nature was all unhinged, felt itself wrestling
in the grip of dark, implacable things, upheld by a single thread above
that moral abyss which yawns beneath us all, into which the individual
life sinks so easily to ruin and nothingness. At such moments a man
realizes within himself, within the circle of consciousness, the germs
of all things hideous and vile. '_Save for the grace of God_,' he says
to himself, shuddering, 'save only for the grace of God----'

Contempt for himself, loathing for life and its possibilities, as he
had just beheld them; moral tumult, pity, remorse