business, his shrewd, wise counsellor in difficulty, his good comrade in pleasure, his sole confidant--it must be remembered that there was no craving for respect on the one side, no possibility of rendering it, no power of missing it, on the other--and the most cherished wife of the most respectable and worthy member of society might have compared her position with that of Harriet with considerable disadvantage on many points. Things were, however, changed of late, and Harriet had begun to feel, with something of the awfully helpless, feeble foreboding with which the victims of conscious madness foresee the approach of the foe, that there was some power, whose origin she did not know, whose nature she could not discern, undermining her, and conquering her unawares. Was it bodily illness? She had always had unbroken health, and was slow to detect any approach of disease. She did not think it could be that, and conscience, remorse, the presence, the truth, of the supernatural components of human life, she disbelieved in; therefore she refused to take the possibility of their existence and their influence into consideration. She was no longer young, and she had suffered--yes, she had certainly suffered a very great deal; no one could love as she loved and not suffer, that was all. Time would do everything for her; things were going well; all risk was at an end, with the procuring of George's promise and the quieting of George's scruples (how feeble a nature his was, she thought, but without the acrid scorn a similar reflection had aroused in her husband's mind); and every week of time gained without the revival of any inquisition, was a century of presumptive safety. Yes, now she was very weak, and certainly not quite well; it was all owing to her sleeplessness. How could any one be well who did not get oblivion in the darkness? This would pass, and time would bring rest and peace. Wholly possessed by her love for her husband, she was not conscious of the change in her manner towards him. She did not know that the strange repulsion she sometimes felt, and which she told herself was merely physical nervousness, had so told upon her, that she was absent and distant with him for the most part, and in the occasional spasmodic bursts of love which she yielded to showed such haunting and harrowing grief as sometimes nearly maddened him with anger, with disgust, with _ennui_--not with repentance, not with compassion--maddened him, not for her sake, but for his own.