Grundy--these are the greatest enemies of the Divorce-Court lawyers; heavy though the list of cases standing over for hearing may be, it would be fifty times heavier could the proceedings be kept secret. Hundreds of couples now living together, hating each other "with the hate of hell;" scowling, carping, badgering, wearing, maddening, to desperation driving, from the hour they rise till the hour they retire to rest and fall asleep,--the one cursing his life, the other feebly bemoaning her fate, or openly defiant, "each going their own way;" a state of being more horrible, loathsome, and pitiable even than the other,--would be disunited, were it not for the public scandal. "For the sake of the children," for the scandal which would be entailed on their offspring, Mrs. Emilia will not leave Mr. Iago; and so they continue to live together, while the children are daily edified spectators of the manner in which their father treats their mother, and listen to the constantly-renewed expression of Mrs. Emilia's wish in reference to the possession of that whip with which to lash the rascal (their father) naked through the world. The exposure--the public scandal! To no one had these words more terror in their sound than to Frank Churchill. All his life he had shrunk from every chance of notoriety: had gloried in being able to work anonymously; not for the sake of shirking any responsibility, not from the slightest doubt of the right and truth and purity of whatever cause he might be advocating: but because, when he had shot his bolt, and hit his mark, as he generally did, he could stand calmly by and mark the result, without being deafened by empty pans or sickened by false flattery. His horror of publicity had been extreme; he had invariably refused all details of his history to contemporary biographers, and had never been so deeply disgusted as when he saw some of his work tracked home to its author by the gossipping correspondent of a provincial paper. It was good work, too--work creditable to his brain and his heart; yet had it been penny-a-lining written to order, he could not have been more annoyed at being accredited with it. And now the full garish eye of day was to be let into the inmost recesses of his heart's sanctuary! "Break lock and seal, betray the trust!" let the whole world revel in the details. A domestic scandal, and one besmirching a man who, despite of himself, had made some name in the world, and a woman whose triumphs had rung through society, was exactly the thing which the "many-headed beast" would most delight in prying into and bandying about. The details?--there were no details; none, at least, which the world would ever hear of, or which would give the smallest explanation of the result. There was the fact of the separation, and nothing more; what led to it must be the work of conjecture, and people would invent all kinds of calumny about him; and--great Heaven!--about her. The lying