ther; and it was thus,
for the first time since they laid their heads on the same pillow,
that the husband met the wife. The skies were intensely clear, and the
lamplight was bright and calm upon the faces of both. There was no
doubt in the mind of either. Suddenly, and with a startled and ghastly
consciousuess, they recognized each other. The wife staggered, and clung
to a post for support; Brandon's look was calm and unmoved. The hour
that his bitter and malignant spirit had yearned for was come; his
nerves expanded in a voluptuous calmness, as if to give him a deliberate
enjoyment of his hope fulfilled. Whatever the words that in that
unwitnessed and almost awful interview passed between them, we may
be sure that Brandon spared not one atom of his power. The lost and
abandoned wife returned home; and all her nature, embruted as it
had become by guilt and vile habits, hardened into revenge,--that
preternatural feeling which may be termed the hope of despair.

Three nights from that meeting Brandon's house was broken into. Like
the houses of many legal men, it lay in a dangerous and thinly populated
outskirt of the town, and was easily accessible to robbery. He was
awakened by a noise; he started, and found himself in the grasp of two
men. At the foot of the bed stood a female, raising a light; and her
face, haggard with searing passions, and ghastly with the leprous
whiteness of disease and approaching death, glared full upon him.

"It is now my turn," said the female, with a grin of scorn which Brandon
himself might have envied; "you have cursed me, and I return the curse!
You have told me that my child shall never name me but to blush. Fool!
I triumph over you; you he shall never know to his dying day! You have
told me that to my child and my child's child (a long transmission of
execration) my name--the name of the wife you basely sold to ruin and
to hell--should be left as a legacy of odium and shame! Man, you shall
teach that child no further lesson whatever: you shall know not whether
he live or die, or have children to carry on your boasted race; or
whether, if he have, those children be not outcasts of the earth, the
accursed of man and God, the fit offspring of the thing you have made
me. Wretch! I hurl back on you the denunciation with which, when we
met three nights since, you would have crushed the victim of your
own perfidy. You shall tread the path of your ambition childless and
objectless and hopeless.