Oh, little objects of art and skill. What hours he must have spent trifling with their suavity, taking them from their hiding-places of an evening after he had heard Mrs. Quince go safely up to bed, and knew that no one was looking, no one likely to break in upon him and surprise him at his comfortable pottering; the hours of mansuetude he must have spent turning and caressing them between his fine sensitive hands! He had not brought out those little objects to show her the day she had gone to tea with him at Starvecrow; oh no! the only thing he had brought out had been the drawing of that woman’s head, which he had so dramatically destroyed in her presence. She saw that destruction now as the first step taken towards his emancipation. But the little objects he had not shown her,--those delicate fraudulent statuettes in terra cotta, those chiselled and prismatic crystals. How bare, how cheerless she had thought his room! those heavy leather armchairs, now so jaunty with chintz! She had pitied him, genuinely and kindly, even through her impatience at his mismanagement of his life. She had chided herself for any passing suspicions that his gloom might be deliberate. And she had seen in her marriage with him an opportunity to perform, supremely at her own expense, a task perhaps worth performing. But what right had she to murmur, when she saw her intentions crumble? She had, indeed, achieved her object, albeit in a manner so disconcertingly unforeseen. She reproached herself, in her mind which gave no quarter, any more than Lovel gave quarter; she reproached herself for not rendering thanks that her task had been thus made easy. What! she dare to murmur because she had been spared the strain of months, even of years? because she had not been permitted to string herself up to an effort daily renewed, an exertion in which her own weariness must never for an instant be allowed to appear? because Calladine had taken the law out of her hands, and had ordained for himself the resurrection to which she had intended to force him? She looked back with the smile of rueful irony to her brave and pitiful plans for his redemption. She had intended,--so gallantly--to set her back for ever towards her old life. She would have devoted herself,--so sturdily,--to the man who had need of her. She would not have flagged. The vision of her married life had disclosed itself during the weeks of her engagement in detail to her anticipation. There was no detail she had shirked,--not even the least picturesque. She had not tried to idealise Calladine; no, rather she had tried to see him in the light that Lovel’s careless scorn had thrown; not as a romantic figure, blasted by the catastrophe of an early passion, but as an incompetent, bungling, pitiable figure. Her pity, her charity, and her contempt would between them have carried her through. But now that she found herself forestalled, as it were,--found that Calladine had already