n.
All the way home, her eyes haunted him, and it is a more dreadful thing
than most are aware to be haunted by anything, good or bad, except the
being who is our life. And those eyes, though not good, were beautiful.
Evil, it is true, has neither part nor lot in beauty; it is absolutely
hostile to it, and will at last destroy it utterly; but the process is
a long one, so long that many imagine badness and beauty vitally
associable. Tom yielded to the haunting, and it was in part the fault
of those eyes that he used such hard words to his wife in the morning.
Wives have not seldom to suffer sorely for discomforts and wrongs in
their husbands of which they know nothing. But the thing will be set
right one day, and in a better fashion than if all the woman's-rights'
committees in the world had their will of the matter.

About this time, from the top, left-hand corner of the last page of
"The Firefly," it appeared that Twilight had given place to Night; for
the first of many verses began to show themselves, in which Twilight,
or Hesper, or Vesper, or the Evening Star, was no more once mentioned,
but only and al-ways Nox, or Hecate, or the dark Diana. _Tenebrious_
was a great word with Tom about this time. He was very fond, also, of
the word _interlunar_. I will not trouble my reader with any specimen
of the outcome of Tom's new inspiration, partly for this reason, that
the verses not unfrequently came so near being good, nay, sometimes
were really so good, that I do not choose to set them down where they
would be treated with a mockery they do not in themselves deserve. He
did not direct his wife's attention to them, nor did he compose them at
home or at the office. Mostly he wrote them between acts at the
theatre, or in any public place where something in which he was not
interested was going on.

Of all that read them, and here was a Nemesis awful in justice, there
was not one less moved by them than she who had inspired them. She saw
in them, it is true, a reflex of her own power--and that pleased, but
it did not move her. She took the devotion and pocketed it, as a greedy
boy might an orange or bull's-eye. The verses in which Tom delighted
were but the merest noise in the ears of the lady to whom of all he
would have had them acceptable. One momentary revelation as to how she
regarded them would have been enough to release him from his foolish
enthrallment. Indignation, chagrin, and mortification would have soon
been