himself not only that he did not believe her to have been false to
him, but that he had never accused her of such crime. He had demanded
from her obedience, and she had been disobedient. It had been
incumbent upon him,--so ran his own ideas, as expressed to himself
in these long unspoken soliloquies,--to exact obedience, or at least
compliance, let the consequences be what they might. She had refused
to obey or even to comply, and the consequences were very grievous.
But, though he pitied himself with a pity that was feminine, yet he
acknowledged to himself that her conduct had been the result of his
own moody temperament. Every friend had parted from him. All those to
whose counsels he had listened, had counselled him that he was wrong.
The whole world was against him. Had he remained in England, the
doctors and lawyers among them would doubtless have declared him to
be mad. He knew all this, and yet he could not yield. He could not
say that he had been wrong. He could not even think that he had been
wrong as to the cause of the great quarrel. He was one so miserable
and so unfortunate,--so he thought,--that even in doing right he had
fallen into perdition!

He had had two enemies, and between them they had worked his ruin.
These were Colonel Osborne and Bozzle. It may be doubted whether he
did not hate the latter the more strongly of the two. He knew now
that Bozzle had been untrue to him, but his disgust did not spring
from that so much as from the feeling that he had defiled himself by
dealing with the man. Though he was quite assured that he had been
right in his first cause of offence, he knew that he had fallen from
bad to worse in every step that he had taken since. Colonel Osborne
had marred his happiness by vanity, by wicked intrigue, by a devilish
delight in doing mischief; but he, he himself, had consummated the
evil by his own folly. Why had he not taken Colonel Osborne by the
throat, instead of going to a low-born, vile, mercenary spy for
assistance? He hated himself for what he had done;--and yet it was
impossible that he should yield.

It was impossible that he should yield;--but it was yet open to him
to sacrifice himself. He could not go back to his wife and say that
he was wrong; but he could determine that the destruction should
fall upon him and not upon her. If he gave up his child and then
died,--died, alone, without any friend near him, with no word of love
in his ears, in that solitary and mis