m.

"But it came to pass, upon my undertaking a journey which my honour
compelled me to make, she forgot her honour, conscience and love for me
to such a degree as to fall in love with a young gentleman whom I had
brought up in this house, and this I thought I could perceive when I
returned home again. Nevertheless, the love I bore her was so great that
I was not able to mistrust her, until at last experience opened my eyes
and made me see what I dreaded more than death, whereupon my love for
her was turned to frenzy and despair in such wise that I watched her
closely, and one day, while feigning to walk abroad, I hid myself in the
room in which she now dwells.

"Thither she withdrew soon after my departure, and sent for the young
gentleman, whom I saw come in with such familiarity as should have been
mine alone. But when I saw him about to get upon the bed beside her, I
sprang out, seized him in her very arms, and slew him. And as my wife's
crime seemed to me so great that death would not suffice to punish it, I
laid upon her a penalty which she must hold, I think, to be more bitter
than death; and this penalty was to shut her up in the room to which she
was wont to retire to take her greatest pleasures in the company of
him for whom she had more love than she had for me; and there I further
placed in a cupboard all her lover's bones, hanging there even as
precious things are hung up in a cabinet.

"That she may not lose the memory of this villain I cause her to be
served with his skull, (2) in place of a cup, when she is eating and
drinking at table, and this always in my presence, so that she may
behold, alive, him whom her guilt has made her mortal enemy, and dead,
through love of her, him whose love she did prefer to mine. And in this
wise, at dinner and at supper, she sees the two things that must be most
displeasing to her, to wit, her living enemy, and her dead lover; and
all this through her own great sinfulness.

2 It will be remembered that the Lombard King Alboin forced
his wife Rosamond to drink his health out of a goblet which
had been made from the skull of her father Cunimond,
sovereign of the Gepidae. To revenge herself for this
affront, Rosamond caused her husband to be murdered one
night during his sleep in his palace at Pavia.--Ed.

"In other matters I treat her as I do myself, save that she goes
shorn; for an array of hair beseems not the adulterous, nor a veil th