And then--then Stewart Routh had to remember how he had killed the man who had taunted, deceived, treated him cruelly; how he had killed him, and robbed him, and gone home and told his wife--his comrade, his colleague, his dauntless, unscrupulous Harriet. He had to remember more than all this, and he hated to remember it. But the obligation was upon him; he could not forget how she had acted, after the first agony had passed over, the first penalty inflicted by her physical weakness, which she had spurned and striven against. So surely as his memory was forced to reproduce all that had gone before, it was condemned to revive all that had come after. But he did not soften towards her that day, no, not in the least, though never had his recollection been so detailed, so minute, so calm. No, he hated her. She wearied him; she had ceased to be of any service to him; she was a constant torment to him. So he came back to the idea with which his reflections had commenced, and, as he entered on the perusal of the mass of papers which awaited his attention in his "chambers" in Tokenhouse-yard--for he shared the business-abode of the invisible Flinders now--he repeated: "What a relief it would be to get away from her for ever!" Only a few days now, and the end must come. He was a brave man in his evil way, and he made his calculations coolly, and scanned his criminal combinations without any foolish excess of confidence, but with well-grounded expectation. For a little longer it would not be difficult to keep on fair terms with Harriet, especially as she had renewed her solitary mode of life, and he had taken the precaution of pretending to a revived devotion to play, since the auspicious occasion on which he had won so largely at Homburg. Thus his absence from home was accounted for; and as she had not the slightest suspicion that Mrs. Ireton P. Bembridge was in London, had never displayed the least jealousy, except on the one occasion when he had shown her the locket, and had unhesitatingly accepted his explanation of their sudden return to England, he had no reason to trouble himself about her. To sedulously avoid exciting her suspicion and jealousy now, and when the proper time should arrive, to confirm the one and arouse the other so effectually by desertion, infidelity, and insult, as to drive her at once to free herself from him by the aid of the law--this was his scheme. It looked well; he knew Harriet, he thought, thoroughly, and he might safely calculate upon the course she would adopt. It was strange, if human inconsistency can ever be strange, that Stewart Routh, a man of eminently vindictive disposition, entirely forgot to take into account that the woman thus desperately injured might also seek her revenge, which would consist in declining to take her own freedom at the price of giving him his.