"After that I found more difficulty in meeting my husband. Oh! wretched story! How I loathe the telling of it! He grew impatient and angry, while, as the days passed on, I shrank with greater dread from letting my parents know what I had done. "Then jealousy, anger, quarrels, and impatience took the place of love. I cannot tell you the history of that wretched time--I dare not. I had to find out then that a Studleigh could indulge in rage as well as love. It was not long before I learned many bitter lessons. "At length one day we had a more than usually angry quarrel, and then my husband vowed that he would leave me. A regiment was ordered to India next week; he would exchange into it, and I should never see him again. In vain I wept, pleaded, prayed. He was in one of his terrible furies, and nothing could move him. Still, I never believed that he would do it. Had I even fancied so, I should have instantly, at any cost, have told my mother all; but I thought it merely a threat, a cruel and unmanly threat, but an empty one. I resolved that for some days I would not write to him. "Oh, Earle Moray! can you imagine my distress when, one short week afterward, I heard it carelessly told that Captain Ulric Studleigh had taken a sudden whim, and had exchanged into another regiment, which had sailed for India that week, and would not in all probability return for years. The lady told the news laughingly, as though it were only a piece of amusing gossip. The comments made were of an indifferent character. Some said India was the best place for younger sons without fortune. Others said it was a thousand pities that there was no chance of the earldom of Linleigh for the gay captain. "No one looked at me; no one thought of me; yet I was the wife of the man they were all discussing. It was many minutes before my senses returned to me; then I found myself grasping the back of a chair to keep myself from falling. Unseen and unnoticed, I contrived to quit the room. Oh, Heaven! when I recall the intolerable anguish of that hour, I wonder that I lived through it. "I had trusted a Studleigh, and had met with the usual reward of those who place confidence in a perfidious race. I think that on the face of the earth there was none so truly desolate and lonely, so frightened, as I was during that time. Married in secret to a man whom my parents disliked, whom the world mentioned with a sneer--a man whose name was a proverb for light-heartedness, inconstancy--married and deserted! "It would have been bad enough had he been here; it would have been a terrible ordeal even had he been by my side, to help me with love and sympathy; but now, alone, unaided--he himself thousands of miles away--what could I do?