These memories should have filled her mother's heart with sick repulsion, but, instead, it was filled with fallacies. His conduct had not been quite what it should have been, perhaps, but then, no one knew--perhaps his wife had not been entirely faultless. She may not have been a suitable companion for so jovial and high-spirited a man. She had probably not known how to manage him. Now she herself had had no such trouble with her husband, though, of course, she had been a much prettier woman than had been the late Mrs. Bulkley. Then he had been a very wealthy man (Letitia's eyes gleamed at the thought), and much was to be forgiven to the wealthy, they were more tried and tempted than other men, and--and--oh, well! someone had said that a man had to break the heart of one wife before he learned how to care properly for a second one. Dorothy, too, was so young and unsuspicious that he would probably justify her sweet confidence in him, while she, Letitia, would keep her eyes very wide open. Not that she would ever interfere between husband and wife--not she! But still there could be no harm in keeping a mother's eye upon what was going on. And then, her very soul hungered after the unforgotten flesh-pots. She calculated to a nicety what William Henry would in common decency have to do for the parents of his bride. They could not be left in that shackly old White house, that was sure; and, of course, she would pay very long visits to her daughter, and--and assist her in guiding her household. Almost she felt the caressing touch of rich furs about her; in imagination she ordered "the brougham," and closely inspected the liveries of the men on the box; and, in fact, was so dazzled with the gleam of Mr. Bulkley's money, so a-hungered for the flesh-pots in his keeping, that she was almost blinded to the sin and shame and degradation that covered his moral character like a leprosy. Yet, not quite--surely not quite! Else why was she so silent as to her wild hopes? A secret she had never kept in all her life before! For years she had crowded the portals of John Lawton's unwilling ears with not only her own secrets but all those she could come by of other people's. Why, then, did she often catch herself up, in that expansive and confidential chat or monologue, peculiar to the marital chamber? Why did she press her thin, rouge-tinted lips so closely and stop so suddenly every time she started to speak of a "splendid chance"? Whose "chance" was she thinking of, and why did she not complete her sentence? John, slow John, began to wonder to himself. It was odd. All her married life Letitia had exalted herself--had proclaimed herself; her superiority, mentally and spiritually, had usurped the husband's authority; yet now it was that helpless, broken gentleman, whose pathetic eyes she shrank from meeting, into whose ears she dared not pour her shameful secret wish: to marry little Dorothy to William Henry Bulkley.