“Could you bear to have your name, your father's name, my name, all dragged into notoriety, all tarnished by being linked with this monstrous tale of a woman who fled--for no reason whatever--from her home, friends, husband, and hid herself, and was found only by an accident?” “Oh, Eben! spare me,” moaned Hetty. “I can't spare you now, Hetty,” he answered. “You must look the thing in the face. I have been looking it in the face ever since the first hour in which I found you. What are we to do?” “I will stay on here if you think it best,” said Hetty. “If you will be happier so. Nobody need ever know that I am alive.” Doctor Eben threw his arms around her. “Leave you here! Why, Hetty, will you never understand that I love you?” he exclaimed; “love you, love you, would no more leave you than I would kill myself?” “But what is there, then, that we can do?” asked Hetty. “Be married again here, as if we had never been married! You under your new name,” replied Doctor Eben rapidly. Hetty's face expressed absolute horror. “We--you and I--married again! Why Eben, it would be a mockery,” she exclaimed. “Not so much a mockery,” her husband retorted, “as every thing that I have done, and every thing that you have done for ten whole years.” “Oh, Eben! I don't think it would be right,” cried Hetty. “It would be a lie.” “A lie!” ejaculated her husband, scornfully. Poor Hetty! The bitter harvest of her wrong deed was garnered for her, poured upon her head at every turn, by the pitilessness of events. Inexorable seasons, surer than any other seedtime and harvest, are those uncalendared seasons in which souls sow and reap with meek patience. Hetty replied: “I know I have lived, acted, told a lie, Eben. Don't taunt me with it. How can you, if you really believe all I have told you of the reasons which led me to it?” “My Hetty,” said Dr. Eben, “I don't taunt you with it. I do believe all you have told me. I do know that you did it for love of me, monstrous though it sounds to say so. But when you refuse now to do the only thing which seems to me possible to be done to repair the mistake, and say your reason for not doing it is that it would be a lie, how can I help pointing back to the long ten years' lie you have lived, acted, told? If your love for me bore you up through that lie, it can bear you up through this.” “Shall we never go home, Eben?” asked Hetty sadly. “To Welbury? to New England? never!” replied her husband with a terrible emphasis. “Never will I take you there to draw down upon our heads all the intolerable shame, and gossiping talk which would follow. I tell you, Hetty, you are dead! I am shielding your name, the name of my dead wife! You don't seem to comprehend in the least that you have been dead for ten years. You talk as if it would be nothing more to explain your reappearance than if you had been away somewhere for a visit longer than you intended.”