"The rage, the passionate despair, the blind fury of the injured husband, it was said, exceeded all bounds. There was of course every sort of public scandal. Legal proceedings and the necessary consequences--a divorce. The wretched history did not even end here. She suffered horribly from shame and despair I have been told, but the shame and despair, had not the effect it ought to have produced. She fell from bad to worse, and was utterly lost. The husband did the same. Wild with the stings of wounded affection, blinded with suffering, he flew for refuge to any excitement which would for a moment assuage his agonies; the gaming-table, and excess in drinking, soon finished the dismal story. He shot himself in a paroxysm of delirium tremens, after having lost almost every penny he possessed at Faro. "You tremble Catherine. Your hand in mine is cold. Oh the pernicious woman! Oh the depths of the misery--if I were indeed to tell you all I have met with and known--which are entailed upon the race by the vanity, the folly, and the vice of women. Angels! yes, angels you are. Sweet Saint--sweet Catherine, and men fall down and worship you--but woe for them when she they worship, proves a fiend. "Dear Miss Arnold, you are shedding tears--but you _would_ have this dismal story. You had better hear no more of it, let me stop now." "Go on--pray go on, Edgar. Tell us about the poor boy and the girls, you said there were four of them." "The boy and his sisters were taken by some relations. It was about a year after these events that I met him at this school. They had sent him here, thinking the army the best place for him. To get him shot off, poor fellow, perhaps, if they could. His four sisters were all then living, and how tenderly, poor lad, he used to talk to me about them. How he would grieve over the treatment they were receiving, with the best intentions he acknowledged, but too hardening and severe he thought for girls so delicate. They wanted a mother's fostering, a father's protection, poor things, but he never alluded in the remotest way to either father or mother. Adam, when he sprung from the earth, was not more parentless than he seemed to consider himself. But he used to talk of future for his sisters, and sometimes in his more cheerful moods, would picture to himself what he would do when he should be a man, and able to shelter them in a home, however humble, of his own. His whole soul was wrapped up in these girls." "Did you ever hear what became of them?" "Three died of consumption, I have been told, just as they were opening into the bloom of early womanhood, almost the loveliest creatures that ever were seen." "And the fourth." "She was the most beautiful of all--a fine, high-spirited, dashing creature. Her brother's secret terror and darling." "Well!" "She followed her mother's example, and died miserably at the age of two-and-twenty."