is, and as he smiled, he took her hand. She did not attempt to
withdraw it, but sat by him in a strange calmness, looking straight
before her into the middle of the room. "You have not struggled with
it. You know, as I do, that it is a bad fiend and a wicked one,--a
fiend that is prompting you to the worst cruelty in the world. Alice!
Alice! Alice! Try to think of all this as though some other person
were concerned. If it were your friend, what advice would you give
her?"

"I would bid her tell the man who had loved her,--that is, if he were
noble, good, and great,--that she found herself to be unfit to be his
wife; and then I would bid her ask his pardon humbly on her knees."
As she said this, she sank before him on to the floor, and looked up
into his face with an expression of sad contrition which almost drew
him from his purposed firmness.

He had purposed to be firm,--to yield to her in nothing, resolving
to treat all that she might say as the hallucination of a sickened
imagination,--as the effect of absolute want of health, for which
some change in her mode of life would be the best cure. She might
bid him begone in what language she would. He knew well that such
was her intention. But he would not allow a word coming from her in
such a way to disturb arrangements made for the happiness of their
joint lives. As a loving husband would treat a wife, who, in some
exceptionable moment of a melancholy malady, should declare herself
unable to remain longer in her home, so would he treat her. As for
accepting what she might say as his dismissal, he would as soon think
of taking the fruit-trees from the southern wall because the sun
sometimes shines from the north. He could not treat either his
interests or hers so lightly as that.

"But what if he granted no such pardon, Alice? I will grant none
such. You are my wife, my own, my dearest, my chosen one. You are all
that I value in the world, my treasure and my comfort, my earthly
happiness and my gleam of something better that is to come hereafter.
Do you think that I shall let you go from me in that way? No, love.
If you are ill I will wait till your illness is gone by; and, if you
will let me, I will be your nurse."

"I am not ill."

"Not ill with any defined sickness. You do not shake with ague, nor
does your head rack you with aching; but yet you may be ill. Think of
what has passed between us. Must you not be ill when you seek to put
an end to all that withou