"Thus is _my_ sky covered with gloom," she murmured, "thus amidst the darkness gleams my one ray of precious light. O blessed ultramarine, from on high I take thee as a token. God is good; God does not will that I should suffer; He does not will that I should love a demon. I am still so young; a long life may be in store for me; a cruel, wretched life with Thornton Rush, who assumed the guise of an angel of light to win me to destruction. A peaceful, happy life with Hubert, for whom heaven itself must have intended me. The sin is Thornton's, not mine, nor Hubert's. On the contrary, to continue to live with Thornton would be a sin. I can no longer deceive myself or him, I love him not; I believe I could hate him!" and a gleam unusual shot from the large, dreamful eyes. Althea forgot, while she thus soliloquised, that she could not thus have felt, or could not have spoken such words, had not Hubert Lisle won her love. While her heart had not been given to another, she could have endured her husband patiently, fulfilling her wifely duties, and possessing a conscience clear before God. She would leave her husband then, not because of the harshness and cruelty allegible, but because she had criminally strayed from her allegiance and given her love where she had no right to give. So blinded, however, was Althea, she did not perceive this. While she was wronged, indeed, by Thornton, she was still farther wronged by Hubert. No unkind treatment of the one could excuse her for listening, without rebuke, to words of unlawful love from the other. They were an insult to her good sense and virtue; and so at first had Althea esteemed them to be. But by and by--ah, it is an old story, and the saddest, sorriest of all stories in this life of ours; reading it, or hearing it, one sighs that our guardian angel's wings are invisible, and that once from out their protecting shadow, we rush headlong unto darkness and death. We will not assert that Thornton felt not the death of his only son; he was not so inhuman as to be unaffected. He would have given all his earthly possessions to hear again that winsome voice of his child resounding through the house. He had not realized "How much of hope, how much of joy, May be buried up with an only boy!" until the house was darkened by the death of Johnny. The grief which he experienced, however, affected him strangely. As we have seen, instead of softening his selfish nature, it rendered him more morose and censorious. It alienated, instead of binding him closer to his bereaved wife.