_"Teach me to feel for others' woes, To hide the fault I see; The mercy I to others show, That mercy show to me."_ Breakfast was just over on the morning following the soirée at the vice chancellor's. Christian sat with the two aunts, quietly sewing. Ay, very quietly, even after last night. She had taken counsel with her own heart, through many wakeful hours, and grown calm and still. Neither her husband nor Miss Gascoigne had once named Sir Edwin. Probably Aunt Henrietta did not know him, and in the crowded party Dr. Grey might not have chanced to recognize him. Indeed, most likely the young man would take every means of avoiding recognition from the master of his own college, whence he had been ignominiously dismissed. His appearance at St. Mary's Lodge was strange enough, and only to be accounted for by his having been invited by the vice chancellor's young wife, who knew him only as Sir Edwin Uniacke, the rich young baronet. But, under shadow of these advantages, no doubt he could easily get into society again, even at Avonsbridge, and would soon be met every where. She might have to meet him--she, who knew what she did know about him, and who, though there had been no absolute engagement between them, had suffered him to address her as a lover for four bright April weeks, ending in that thunderbolt of horror and pain, after which he never came again to the farm-house, and she never heard from or of him one word more. Ought she to have told all this to her husband--was it her duty to tell him now? Again and again the question recurred to her, full of endless perplexities. She and Dr. Grey were not like two young people of equal years. Why trouble him, a man of middle age, with what he might think a silly, girlish love-story? and, above all, why wound him by what is the sharpest pain to a loving heart, the sudden discovery of things hitherto concealed, but which ought to have been told long ago? He might feel it thus--or thus--she could not tell; she did not, even yet, know him well enough to be quite sure. The misfortune of all hasty unions had been hers--she had to find out everything after marriage. The sweet familiarity of long courtship, which makes peculiarities and faults excusable, nay, dear, just because they are so familiar that the individual would not be himself or herself without them--this sacred guarantee for all wedded happiness had not been the lot of Christian Grey. Even now, though it was the mere ghost of a dead love, or dead fancy, which she had to confess to her husband, she shrank from confessing it. She would rather let it slip to its natural Hades.