"There is some terrible mistake somewhere," says Clarissa, in a very distressed voice, feeling it wiser not to argue the point further. "Time will surely clear it up sooner or later, but it is very severe on Dorian while it lasts. I have known the dear fellow all my life, and cannot now begin to think evil of him. I have always felt more like a sister to him than anything else, and I cannot believe him guilty of this thing." "_I_ am his wife, and I _can_," says Mrs. Branscombe, icily. "If you loved him as you ought, you could not." This is the one rebuke she cannot refrain from. Georgie laughs unpleasantly, and then, all in a little moment, she varies the performance by bursting into a passionate and most unlooked-for flood of tears. "Don't talk to me of love!" she cries, miserably. "It is useless. I don't believe in it. It is a delusion, a mere mockery, a worn-out superstition. You will tell me that Dorian loved me; and yet in the very early days before our marriage, when his so-called love must have been at its height, he insulted me beyond all forgiveness." "You are making yourself wretched about nothing," says Clarissa, kneeling beside her, and gently drawing her head down on her shoulder. "Don't, darling,--don't cry like that. I know, I feel, all will come right in the end. Indeed, unless Dorian were to come to me and say, 'I have done this hateful thing,' I should not believe it." "I would give all the world to be able to say that from my heart," says Mrs. Branscombe, with excessive sadness. "Try to think it. Afterwards belief will be easy. Oh, Georgie, do not nourish hard thoughts; tear them from your heart, and by and by, when all this is explained away, think how glad you will be that, without proof, you had faith in him. Do you know, unless my own eyes saw it, I should never for any reason lose faith in Horace." A tender, heavenly smile creeps round her beautiful lips as she says this. Georgie, seeing it, feels heart-broken. Oh that she could have faith like this! "It is too late," she says, bitterly: "and I deserve all I have got. I myself have been the cause of my own undoing. I married Dorian for no other reason than to escape the drudgery of teaching. Yet now"--with a sad smile--"I know there are worse things than Murray's Grammar. I am justly punished." Her lovely face is white with grief. I have tried, _tried_, TRIED to disbelieve, but nothing will raise this cloud of suspicion from my breast. It weighs me down and crushes me more cruelly day by day. "I wish--I wish"--cries poor little Georgie, from her very soul--"that I had never been born, because I shall never know a happy moment again." The tears run silently down her cheeks one by one. She puts up her small hands to defend herself, and the action is pitiable in the extreme. "How happy you were only a month ago!" says Clarissa, striken with grief at the sight of her misery.