rs of necessity
forced each party to preserve an armed neutrality towards the other,
whilst they waited for a suitable opportunity to assert themselves.
Not that their objects were quite the same. Belle merely wished to be
free from her husband, whom she had always disliked, and whom she now
positively hated with that curious hatred which women occasionally
conceive toward those to whom they are legally bound, when they have
been bad enough or unfortunate enough to fall in love with somebody
else. He, on the contrary, had that desire for revenge upon her which
even the gentler stamp of man is apt to conceive towards one who,
herself the object of his strong affection, daily and hourly repels
and repays it with scorn and infidelity. He did love her truly; she
was the one living thing in all his bitter lonely life to whom his
heart had gone out. True, he put pressure on her to marry him, or what
comes to the same thing, allowed and encouraged her drunken old father
to do so. But he had loved her and still loved her, and yet she mocked
at him, and in the face of that fact about the money--her money, which
he had paid away to the other woman, a fact which it was impossible
for him to explain except by admission of guilt which would be his
ruin, what was he to urge to convince her of this, even had she been
open to conviction? But it was bitter to him, bitter beyond all
conception, to have this, the one joy of his life, snatched from him.
He threw himself with ardour into the pursuit after wealth and dignity
of position, partly because he had a legitimate desire for these
things, and partly to assuage the constant irritation of his mind, but
to no purpose. These two spectres of his existence, his tiger wife and
the fair woman who was his wife in name, constantly marched side by
side before him, blotting out the beauty from every scene and souring
the sweetness of every joy. But if in his pain he thirsted for revenge
upon Belle, who would have none of him, how much more did he desire to
be avenged upon Edward Cossey, who, as it were, had in sheer
wantonness robbed him of the one good thing he had? It made him mad to
think that this man, to whom he knew himself to be in every way
superior, should have had the power thus to injure him, and he longed
to pay him back measure for measure, and through /his/ heart's
affections to strike him as mortal a blow as he had himself received.

Mr. Quest was no doubt a bad man; his whole lif