Often Gloria tried to see and console her stricken uncle; but he always refused to have her, saying: “Let all innocent beings keep aloof from me.” Thus, in alternations between the frenzy of remorse and the stupor of despair, Marcel de Crespigney passed the interval between the death and burial of his “murdered wife,” as, in his morbid self-reproach, he called her. “Words kill!” he answered to the expostulations of his friend, the doctor. “Words kill, and I killed her with cruel words! The last words I spoke to her—the last words her failing senses heard from me—were cruel, murderous words! They killed her! What though no law can drag me before an earthly tribunal to answer for her life? Before the awful judgment seat of the God in my own soul, I stand a self-convicted murderer!” The good doctor shrugged his shoulders, reflecting that it was of no use to argue with a man whose morbid sensibility made him, for the time being, a monomaniac. Marcel de Crespigney, who had so greatly distinguished himself for martial courage and ability during the Mexican war, was weaker than a child where his sympathies were involved. This weakness had betrayed him into all the misery of his life. It had drawn him, in his early youth, into a marriage with a plain, sickly, faded woman, who loved him with that morbid, exclusive, absorbing passion that, disappointed, sometimes sends its victim to the madhouse or the grave. He had married her—let the truth be here told—from the promptings of compassion alone. He had given her all that he had to give—sympathy, tenderness, service. But this was not love—not the love she craved and missed. Hence came humiliation, morbid brooding, and the monomania that turned all his kindly acts and motives into outrage and offence. Had children blessed their union, and so divided her thoughts and affections, or had they—the husband and wife—though childless, lived in a city, where society must have claimed some of her attention, and taught her something of life, she might have been much healthier in mind and body, and their marriage might have been happier. But in the drear solitude of Promontory Hall, with no children to fondle, no society but that of the studious, intellectual man whom she vainly and madly loved, there could have been but one of two results for her—madness or death. The most merciful of the two was hers. But it was also impossible that De Crespigney’s mind, under all these circumstances, should have retained its healthy tone, or that his long patience should not have at last become exhausted, so that in one moment of unexampled exasperation he lost the self-control of years and told her the truth—the truth, not “in love,” but in wrath and scorn, that had slain her.