tement. Led on by some strange, mysterious influence, which he could
as little account for as resist, he had come back to the city where the
fatal incident of his life had occurred. With what purpose, he could not
tell. It was not, indeed, that he had no object in view. It was rather
that he had so many and conflicting ones that they marred and destroyed
each other. No longer under the guidance of calm reason, his head
wandered from the past to the present and the future, disturbed by
passion and excited by injured self-love. At one moment, sentiments of
sorrow and shame would take the ascendant; and at the next, a vindictive
desire to follow out his vengeance and witness the ruin that he had
accomplished. The unbroken, unrelieved pressure of one thought, for
years and years of time, had at last undermined his reasoning powers;
and every attempt at calm judgment or reflection was sure to be attended
with some violent paroxysm of irrepressible rage.

There are men in whom the combative element is so strong that it usurps
all their guidance, and when once they are enlisted in a contest, they
cannot desist till the struggle be decided for or against them. Such was
Glencore. To discover that the terrible injury he had inflicted on
his wife had not crushed her nor driven her with shame from the world,
aroused once more all the vindictive passions of his nature. It was a
defiance he could not withstand. Guilty or innocent, it mattered not;
she had braved him,--at least so he was told,--and as such he had come
to see her with his own eyes. If this was the thought which predominated
in his mind, others there were that had their passing power over
him,--moments of tenderness, moments in which the long past came back
again, full of softening memories; and then he would burst into tears
and cry bitterly.

If he ventured to project any plan for reconciliation with her he had
so cruelly wronged, he as suddenly bethought him that her spirit was not
less high and haughty than his own. She had, so far as he could learn,
never quailed before his vengeance; how, then, might he suppose would
she act in the presence of his avowed injustice? Was it not, besides,
too late to repair the wrong? Even for his boy's sake, would it not be
better if he inherited sufficient means to support an honorable life,
unknown and unnoticed, than bequeath to him a name so associated with
shame and sorrow?

"Who can tell," he would cry aloud, "what my harsh