"Three dreamy weeks of delirious wifehood, balanced by thirteen years of toil, aspersion, hatred, persecution; goaded by want, pursued ceaselessly by the scorpion scourge whose slanderous lash coiled ever after my name, my reputation. Three weeks a bride,--unrecognized as such even then,--twelve years an outcast,--repudiated, insulted,--mother and child, denied, derided,--cast off as a serpent's skin!--Ah, memory! thou hast no charm to stir the blackened ashes in a heart extinguished by the steady sleet of a husband's repudiation. When love is dead, and regret is decently buried, and the song of hope is hushed for ever, then revenge mounts the chariot and gathers the reins in her hands of steel; and beyond the writhing hearts whose blood dyes her rushing wheels sees only the goal. Some wise anatomists of that frail yet invincible sphinx--woman's nature, babble of one weighty fact, one conquering law,--that only the mother-joy, the mother-love, fully unseals the slumbering sweetness and latent tenderness of her being; for me, maternity opened the sluices of a sea of hate and gall. Had I never felt the velvet touch of tiny fingers on my cheek, a husband's base desertion might in time have been forgiven, possibly at least, forgotten; but the first wail from my baby's lips awoke the wolf in me. My wrongs might slumber till that last assize, when the pitying eyes of Christ sum up the record, but hers--have made a hungry panther of my soul. Come, memory, unlock your treasure house, uncoil your spells, chant all your witching strains, and let us see whether the towers of _Notre Dame_ will not tremble and dissolve as soon as I?" Bending to a trunk near her chair, she unlocked it, and taking out a _papier-mache_ box, opened it with a small key that hung from her watch chain, and placed it on the table before her, where she had thrown the unread letters. Leaning forward, she crossed her arms upon the marble, and looked down on the contents of the box,--her child's letters,--her own unanswered appeals in behalf of her babe,--a photograph of the latter,--and most prominent of all, a large square ambrotype of a handsome boyish face, with a short curl of black hair lying inside the case. "Idolatrous? Yes all women are, embryo pagans, and the only comfort is, that when the idol crumbles into clay, mocking our prayers and offerings, we still worship at the same old shrine, having dusted and garnished and set thereon--maybe the Furies, which bid fair to survive the wreck of gods, of creeds, and of time. Like Oenone, we are all betrayed sooner or later by our rose-lipped Paris,-- 'Beautiful Paris, evil-hearted Paris,'