It is a difficult thing to tear the affections from one who, in times past, has been their stay and centre; and it may be doubted whether the heart can ever wholly alienate a once-cherished object; but that love, which comprehends the softest feelings of our nature, bound together by the most tender memories, should be proof to a continuous succession of outrageous assaults, and survive all fellowship and reciprocity, seems almost impossible. Yet Dame Shedlock, in her attachment to her husband, realised this seeming anomaly. After a life of ill-usage, she still clung to him as fondly, as devotedly, and even as passionately, as on the day that, glowing with maidenly confusion, she first surrendered to him her hand and heart. He might be a bad man; she might know that, in his dealings with the world, he often committed very unscrupulous acts; but yet her bosom found him an excuse, or awarded him a justification. Such a deed might appear evil in her eye, but it had, no doubt, a sanction in the practice of the world, or was called for and justified by the circumstances of the times. She would not acknowledge that the absolute possessor of her most precious sympathies, on whom she reposed her happiness here, and her wishes of hereafter, was stained and defiled with the hideous colours of guilt: even if he were so, it was not by her, the wife and partner of his bosom, that his actions were to be questioned, or his conduct condemned. In short, despite his ill-usage, and the groveling selfishness of his nature, which he seemed to pride himself in making apparent, she loved him; and this explains, in one word, every trait in her conduct that appears singular or unnatural. If Dame Shedlock had been a mother, her love for her husband might, from the division of her affections, have been less stable, and more alive to those slights and provocations, which fall on the heart with a depressing influence. Less possessed by her love, she would have viewed his character more closely: she would have deemed his affectation of sanctity, which she now considered pure and genuine, sheer hypocrisy, and his violations of right, oppressive and sinful. His selfishness, dissimulation, and avarice, however disguised, would have deprived him of her respect; and his tyrannical disposition would probably have provoked her contempt. But, secluded from all society, having no channel but him for the sweetest effusions of her amiable and gentle nature, her love was without restraint, and she could see in his heart no shade of evil, or trace of blemish.