A shudder shook her frame as she uttered this simple and short sentence. Simple and short as it was, it seemed to possess a strange signification. That it was associated in her mind with some circumstances of peculiar import, was sufficiently obvious. What were these circumstances? Ah! that question! I ran over in my thought, in a single instant, all that array of events, on that fatal night, which could by any possibility distress me, and confirm my suspicions. That waltz with Edgerton--that long conference between them--that lonely ride together from the home of Mrs. Delaney, in a close carriage--and the subsequent disaster--her unconscious ravings, and the strong, strange language which she employed, clearly full of meaning as it was, but in which I could discover one meaning only! all these topics of doubt and agitation passed through my brain in consecutive order, and with a compact arrangement which seemed as conclusive as any final issue. I said nothing; but what I might have said, was written in my face. Julia regarded me with a gaze of painful anxiety. What she read in my looks must have been troublously impressive. Her cheeks grew paler as she looked. Her eyes wandered from me vacantly, and I could see her thin soft lips quivering faintly like rose-leaves which an envious breeze has half separated from the parent-flower. Mrs. Delaney watched our mutual faces, and I left the room to avoid her scrutiny. I only re-entered it with the physician. He administered medicine to my wife. “She will do very well now, I think,” he said to me when leaving the house; “but she requires to be treated very tenderly. All causes of excitement must be kept from her. She needs soothing, great care, watchful anxiety. Clifford, above all, you should leave her as little as possible. This old woman, her mother, is no fit companion for her--scarcely a pleasant one. I do not mean to reproach you; ascribe what I say to a real desire to serve and make you happy; but let me tell you that Mrs. Delaney has intimated to me that you neglect your wife, that you leave her very much at night; and she further intimates, what I feel assured can not well be the case, that you have fallen into other and much more evil habits.” “The hag!” “She is all that, and loves you no better now than before. Still, it is well to deprive such people of their scandal-mongering, of the meat for it at least. I trust, Clifford, for your own sake, that you were absent of necessity on Wednesday night.” “It will be enough for me to think so, sir,” was my reply.