cruel, how mad, how wicked!"

"Could you not say to him simply this?--'Let us be together, wherever
it may be; and let bygones be bygones.'"

"While he is watching me with a policeman? While he is still thinking
that I entertain a--lover? While he believes that I am the base thing
that he has dared to think me?"

"He has never believed it."

"Then how can he be such a villain as to treat me like this? I could
not go to him, Nora;--not unless I went to him as one who was known
to be mad, over whom in his wretched condition it would be my duty
to keep watch. In no other way could I overcome my abhorrence of the
outrages to which he has subjected me."

"But for the child's sake, Emily."

"Ah, yes! If it were simply to grovel in the dust before him it
should be done. If humiliation would suffice,--or any self-abasement
that were possible to me! But I should be false if I said that I look
forward to any such possibility. How can he wish to have me back
again after what he has said and done? I am his wife, and he has
disgraced me before all men by his own words. And what have I done,
that I should not have done;--what left undone on his behalf that
I should have done? It is hard that the foolish workings of a weak
man's mind should be able so completely to ruin the prospects of a
woman's life!"

Nora was beginning to answer this by attempting to shew that the
husband's madness was, perhaps, only temporary, when there came a
knock at the door, and Mrs. Outhouse was at once in the room. It
will be well that the reader should know what had taken place at the
parsonage while the two sisters had been together up-stairs, so that
the nature of Mrs. Outhouse's mission to them may explain itself. Mr.
Outhouse had been in his closet down-stairs, when the maid-servant
brought word to him that Mr. Trevelyan was in the parlour, and was
desirous of seeing him.

"Mr. Trevelyan!" said the unfortunate clergyman, holding up both his
hands. The servant understood the tragic importance of the occasion
quite as well as did her master, and simply shook her head. "Has your
mistress seen him?" said the master. The girl again shook her head.
"Ask your mistress to come to me," said the clergyman. Then the girl
disappeared; and in a few minutes Mrs. Outhouse, equally imbued with
the tragic elements of the day, was with her husband.

Mr. Outhouse began by declaring that no consideration should induce
him to see Trevelyan, and commissioned hi