“Oh, yes; that is how these miserable villains get hold upon people of weak minds. His wife! I’d have sent him to gaol. His wife would have been far better without a low blackguard like that. But don’t let me keep you. Go and give the _coup de grace_ to Mannering. I shall be ready, whatever happens, downstairs.” But Miss Bethune did not give Mannering the _coup de grace_. On the contrary, she helped forward the cure which the climax of his own personal tragedy had begun. It gave both these people a kind of forlorn pleasure to think that there was a kind of resemblance in their fate, and that they had lived so long beside each other without knowing it, without suspecting how unlike other people their respective lives had been. The thought of the unhappy young woman, whose husband of a year and whose child of a day had been torn from her, who had learnt so sadly to know the unworthiness of the one, and whose heart and imagination had for five and twenty years dwelt upon the other, without any possible outlet, and with a hope which she had herself known to be fantastic and without hope, filled Mannering with a certain awe. He had suffered for little more than half that time, and he had not been deprived of his Dora. He began to think pitifully, even mercifully, of the woman who had left him that one alleviation in his life. “I bow my head before her,” Miss Bethune said. “She must have been a just woman. The bairn was yours, and she had no right to take her from you. She fled before your appearance, she could not look you in the face, but she left the little child that she adored to be your comfort. Mr. Mannering, you will come with me to that poor woman’s grave, and you will forgive her. She gave you up what was most dear to her in life.” He shook his head. “She had others that were more dear to her.” “I could find it in my heart, if I were you, to hope that it was so; but I do not believe it. How could she look you in the face again, having sinned against you? But she left you what she loved most. ‘Dora, Dora,’ was all her cry: but she put Dora out of her arms for you. Think kindly of her, man! A woman loves nothing on this earth,” cried Miss Bethune with passion, “like the little child that has come from her, and is of her, flesh of her flesh, bone of her bone: and she gave that over to you. She must have been a woman more just than most other women,” Miss Bethune said.