on earth, no woman has
ever been truer to her husband than I have been to you."

"Were you lying to me then at Casalunga when you acknowledged that
you had been false to your duties?"

"If I acknowledged that, I did lie. I never said that; but yet I did
lie,--believing it to be best for you that I should do so. For your
honour's sake, for the child's sake, weak as you are, Louis, I must
protest that it was so. I have never injured you by deed or thought."

"And yet you have lied to me! Is a lie no injury;--and such a lie!
Emily, why did you lie to me? You will tell me to-morrow that you
never lied, and never owned that you had lied."

Though it should kill him, she must tell him the truth now. "You were
very ill at Casalunga," she said, after a pause.

"But not so ill as I am now. I could breathe that air. I could live
there. Had I remained I should have been well now,--but what of
that?"

"Louis, you were dying there. Pray, pray listen to me. We thought
that you were dying; and we knew also that you would be taken from
that house."

"That was my affair. Do you mean that I could not keep a house over
my head?" At this moment he was half lying, half sitting, in a large
easy chair in the little drawing-room of their cottage, to which he
had been carried from the adjoining bed-room. When not excited, he
would sit for hours without moving, gazing through the open window,
sometimes with some pretext of a book lying within the reach of his
hand; but almost without strength to lift it, and certainly without
power to read it. But now he had worked himself up to so much energy
that he almost raised himself up in his chair, as he turned towards
his wife. "Had I not the world before me, to choose a house in?"

"They would have put you somewhere, and I could not have reached
you."

"In a madhouse, you mean. Yes;--if you had told them."

"Will you listen, dear Louis? We knew that it was our duty to bring
you home; and as you would not let me come to you, and serve you, and
assist you to come here where you are safe,--unless I owned that you
had been right, I said that you had been right."

"And it was a lie,--you say now?"

"All that is nothing. I cannot go through it; nor should you. There
is the only question. You do not think that I have been--? I need not
say the thing. You do not think that?" As she asked the question, she
knelt beside him, and took his hand in hers, and kissed it. "Say that
you do not think tha