and again in the course of the winter asked her why she did not wear her
usual style of evening dress, and she had replied that it was on account
of her cough.

"It is well that my face does not show loss of flesh as quickly as the
rest of my body does," she said quietly. "I have lost thirty-five pounds
of flesh in four months, and nobody observed it! Yes, dear," she went on,
"I have felt it. More than that, I have felt it increasingly every hour,
and I can bear no more. Up to this time I have never by look or tone shown
to John that I knew it. He wonders every hour what it means that I do not.
I have never by so much as the slightest act watched him. I have seen
notes in Emma's handwriting lying on his desk, and I have left the house
lest I might be tempted to read them! I know that he has as yet done no
clandestine thing, but at any moment I should have led them both into it
by showing one symptom of jealousy. And I should have roused in his heart
a feeling of irritation and impatience with me, which would have done in
one hour more to intensify his love for her, and to change its nature from
a pure, involuntary sentiment into an acknowledged and guilty one, than
years and years of free intercourse could do. But I have reached the
limit of my physical endurance. My nerves are giving away. I am really
very ill, but nothing is out of order in my body aside from the effects of
this anguish. A month more of this would make me a hopelessly broken-down
woman. A month's absence from the sight of it will almost make me well."

I could not refrain from interrupting her.

"Ellen, you are mad! you are mad! You mean to go away and leave him to see
her constantly alone, unrestrained by your presence? It has almost killed
you to see it. How can you bear imagining it, knowing it?"

"Better than I can bear seeing it, far better. Because I have still
undiminished confidence in the real lastingness of the bond between John
and me. Emma Long would have been no doubt a good, a very good wife for
him. But I am the mother of his children, and just so surely as right is
right, and wrong is wrong, he will return to me and to them. All wrong
things are like diseases, self-limited. It is wrong for a man to love any
woman better than he loves his wife; I don't deny that, dear," she said,
half smiling through her tears at my indignant face; "but a man may seem
to do it when he is really very far from it. He may really do it for days,
for month