There was truth in what she had said, apart from the maudlin sentiment from which not even the strongest-minded woman, he supposed, could wholly free herself--there was truth, a stern, hard truth. He could indeed escape now, taking with him just enough money to enable them to live in decent comfort, or to make a fresh start in a distant land, where only the hard and honest industries throve and came to good. How he loathed the thought! How his soul sickened at the tame, miserable prospect! He would have loathed it always, even when Harriet and he were friends and lovers; and now, when he feared her, when he was tired of her, when he hated her, to contemplate such a life _now_, was worse--well, not worse than death, that is always the worst of all things to a bad man, but something too bad to be thought of. There was truth in what she had said, and the knowledge of what was in his own thoughts, the knowledge she did not share, made it all the more true. Supposing he determined to denounce George, and supposing Harriet refused to aid him, what then? Then he must only set her at defiance. If such a wild impossibility as her betraying him could become real, it would be useless. She was his wife; she could not bear witness against him; in that lay his strength and security, even should the very worst, the most inconceivably unlikely of human events, come to pass. And he would set her at defiance! He kept up no reticence with himself now. Within a few days a change had come upon him, which would have been terrible even to him, had he studied it. He hated her. He hated her, not only because he had fallen madly in love with another woman and was day by day becoming more enslaved by this new passion; not chiefly even because of this, but because she was a living link between him and the past. That this should have happened now! That she should have right and reason, common sense, and all the force of probability on her side, in urging him to fly, now--now when he was prospering, when the success of a new speculation in which he had just engaged would, with almost absolute certainty, bring him fortune,--this exasperated him almost to the point of frenzy.