His hatred of George was mixed with the bitterest contempt. When he found the young man amenable beyond his expectations; when he found him unshaken in the convictions with which Harriet had contrived to inspire him and hardly requiring to be supported by his own arguments, his reassurance was inferior to his scorn. "The fool, the wretched, contemptible idiot!" Routh said, as he looked round his dressing-room that night, and noted one by one the signs which would have betokened to a practised eye preparations for an abrupt departure, "it is hardly worth while to deceive him, and to rule such a creature. He was full of suspicion of me before he went away, and the first fruits of that pretty and affecting conversation of his, under the influence of his mother and the territorial decencies of Poynings, was what he flattered himself was a resolution to pay me off, and be free of me. He yields to my letter without the slightest difficulty, and comes here the moment he returns. He believes in Harriet as implicitly as ever; and if he is not as fond of me as he was, he is quite as obedient." The cynical nature of the man showed itself in the impatient weariness with which he thought of his success, and in the levity with which he dismissed, or at least tried to dismiss, the subject from his mind. There was, however, one insuperable obstacle to his getting rid of it--his wife. Harriet had miscalculated her strength; not the strength of her intellect, but that of her nerves, and the strain had told upon them. She still loved her husband with a desperate kind of love; but all its peace, all its strength, all its frankness--and even in the evil life they had always led it had possessed these qualities--had vanished. She loved him now with all the old intensity of passion, but with an element of fierceness added to it, with a horrid craving and fear, sometimes with a sudden repulsion, which she rebelled against as physical cowardice, causing her to shrink from him in the darkness, and to shut her ears from the sound of his breathing in his sleep. And then she would upbraid herself fiercely, and ask herself if she, who had given him all her life and being, who had renounced for him--though she denied to herself that such renunciation was any sacrifice, for did she not love him, as happy women, the caressed of society, do not know how to love--home, name, kindred, and God, could possibly shrink from him now? She had not played any pretty little game of self-deception; she had not persuaded herself that he was other than he really was; she did not care, she loved _him_, just as he was, no better and no worse. She lived for him, she believed in, she desired, she asked no other life; and if a terrible anguish had come into that life latterly, that was her share of it, her fair share. It was not easy, for she was a woman and weak; her nerves would thrill sometimes, and phantoms swarm about her; sleeplessness would