A thwarted, warped, disjointed existence had hers been from its beginning. Denied food suitable for the mental and spiritual need; denied sympathy, air, and expression of suffering; under the slow torture of this starvation, every avenue to goodness and liberty hedged up, and, for the future, temptation, repudiation, loneliness, perhaps a sullied name--who could dispute her right to try release by one brief pang she alone could feel? Who would miss her? Not the world that flattered her wealth and wit, her laces, silks, and diamonds; not the mother and sister who worshipped the gilded Juggernaut "Society;" not he who was that night sleeping soundly on the same sea that would embosom her in her sweeter, deeper slumber. Shocked he might be at an event so unexpected and uncommon. His next sensation would be a relief at his deliverance from a burden, at his freedom to come and go as he liked--no longer banished by her obstinacy and his own. He had loved her as most other men do their wives--a bond too weak to bear a heavy blow at their self-love. She had sinned beyond forgiveness in his eyes. Of Philip she thought with a mingling of tenderness and resentment. His unthinking gallantry had been the root of her sorest trouble; but it was unthinking, not wilful wrong. Nor was she the only sufferer. His heart was well-nigh as hungry as hers. Within the past week she had seen this more clearly than ever before, and he had felt it! Lucy's narrow mind, her insipidity, her inordinate vanity, her selfish idolatry of pleasures that wearied him; her disrelish for intellectual and domestic enjoyments, displayed in its most objectionable form, in her indifference to his company, and her neglect of her child--these were working out their legitimate result in his alienation from her, and attraction towards the once slighted sister, whose large heart and mental gifts he now valued at their true worth. To repel him, as much as to drown her cares, Sarah had plunged into the vortex she had heretofore avoided. She had heard that there was temporary solace in this species of dissipation. The cup was, for her, sparkless and bitter, from surface to dregs. She was saving him with herself by this final step! He would realize this truth, in the throe that would shake his soul when he found she was gone; perhaps, even in that anguished hour, would bless her for having showed to him, while she drove him back from, the abyss they were together approaching. It was no idle vaunt she had made to Lewis, that the principles inherited from her father would save her from overt sin. Thus, thus would she flee the temptation, when the heart had left the will to battle unaided.