efrain from hard words. How was it possible that she
should vindicate her own honour, without asserting with all her
strength that she had been ill-used; and, to speak truth on the
matter, her love for the man, which had once been true and eager, had
been quelled by the treatment she had received. She had clung to her
love in some shape, in spite of the accusations made against her,
till she had heard that the policeman had been set upon her heels.
Could it be possible that any woman should love a man, or at least
that any wife should love a husband, after such usage as that? At
last she crept gently down the stairs, and stood at the parlour-door.
She listened, and could hear his steps, as he paced backwards and
forwards through the room. She looked back, and could see the face
of the servant peering round from the kitchen-stairs. She could not
endure to be watched in her misery, and, thus driven, she opened the
parlour-door. "Louis," she said, walking into the room, "Aunt Mary
has desired me to come to you."

"Emily!" he exclaimed, and ran to her and embraced her. She did not
seek to stop him, but she did not return the kiss which he gave her.
Then he held her by her hands, and looked into her face, and she
could see how strangely he was altered. She thought that she would
hardly have known him, had she not been sure that it was he. She
herself was also changed. Who can bear sorrow without such change,
till age has fixed the lines of the face, or till care has made them
hard and unmalleable? But the effect on her was as nothing to that
which grief, remorse, and desolation had made on him. He had had
no child with him, no sister, no friend. Bozzle had been his only
refuge,--a refuge not adapted to make life easier to such a man as
Trevelyan; and he,--in spite of the accusations made by himself
against his wife, within his own breast hourly since he had
left her,--had found it to be very difficult to satisfy his own
conscience. He told himself from hour to hour that he knew that he
was right; but in very truth he was ever doubting his own conduct.

"You have been ill, Louis," she said, looking at him.

"Ill at ease, Emily;--very ill at ease! A sore heart will make the
face thin, as well as fever or ague. Since we parted I have not had
much to comfort me."

"Nor have I,--nor any of us," said she. "How was comfort to come from
such a parting?"

Then they both stood silent together. He was still holding her by
the ha