indeed. What should I have done if such had happened to me when we
had been six months married?"

"It couldn't have been."

"Why not to you as well as to another?"

"I was only a young girl."

"But if you had been a widow?"

"Don't, my dear; don't! It wouldn't have been possible."

"But you pity her?"

"Oh yes."

"And you see that a great misfortune has fallen upon her, which she could
not help?"

"Not till she knew it," said the wife who had been married quite properly.

"And what then? What should she have done then?"

"Gone," said the wife, who had no doubt as to the comfort, the beauty, the
perfect security of her own position.

"Gone?"

"Gone away at once."

"Whither should she go? Who would have taken her by the hand? Who would
have supported her? Would you have had her lay herself down in the first
gutter and die?"

"Better that than what she did do," said Mrs. Wortle.

"Then, by all the faith I have in Christ, I think you are hard upon her.
Do you think what it is to have to go out and live alone;--to have to look
for your bread in desolation?"

"I have never been tried, my dear," said she, clinging close to him. "I
have never had anything but what was good."

"Ought we not to be kind to one to whom Fortune has been so unkind?"

"If we can do so without sin."

"Sin! I despise the fear of sin which makes us think that its contact
will soil us. Her sin, if it be sin, is so near akin to virtue, that I
doubt whether we should not learn of her rather than avoid her."

"A woman should not live with a man unless she be his wife." Mrs.
Wortle said this with more of obstinacy than he had expected.

"She was his wife, as far as she knew."

"But when she knew that it was not so any longer,--then she should have
left him."

"And have starved?"

"I suppose she might have taken bread from him."

"You think, then, that she should go away from here?"

"Do not you think so? What will Mrs. Stantiloup say?"

"And I am to turn them out into the cold because of a virago such as she
is? You would have no more charity than that?"

"Oh, Jeffrey! what would the Bishop say?"

"Cannot you get beyond Mrs. Stantiloup and beyond the Bishop, and think
what Justice demands?"

"The boys would all be taken away. If you had a son, would you send him
where there was a schoolmaster living,--living----. Oh, you wouldn't."

It is very clear to the Doctor that his wife's mind was made up on the