Oh, husband! oh, lover! though to the past only those titles now belong; by your own sufferings, remember hers! By your own misery, when, feeling yourself dying alone on the great deep, your physical torments yielded to the fiercer tortures of your heart when you thought of your wife praying for him, whom, you said to yourself, she shall never see again, remember her! pity her! Was his imagination so poor that he could not find it in him to make, out of the landlady’s brief tale, a pregnant, bitter picture of his wife’s trials? Not so! To such a heart as his, one hint of misery would bring with it many piteous details. There was infinite anguish in the picture his fancy drew; but he forced himself to contemplate it, that the jealousy, the disappointment, the despair of unfulfilled hope, might melt out of his heart, and leave it a fit shrine for the consecration of the two images which the uncontrollable will of his humanity as a father and a husband declared should be placed there. His fingers had stolen over his face as he stood before the looking-glass. A long time he thus remained, while the sun went down behind the trees in the far-off fields, and the twilight stole softly into the room and made his figure visionary. When he withdrew his hands from his eyes, they were wet; but the one star shining clearly in the dark blue overhead had dawned out of the light to witness a fairer sight than the sun had shone upon--a face from which all vestige of hardness and severity had passed, eyes heavy with tears upturned to God’s kingdom, and lips whispering a prayer for help, for courage, for counsel, to aid the resolution of his heart, intent upon a noble self-sacrifice that should yet not remove it from the sphere of all that it held dearest on earth. CHAPTER XXIV. HANWITCH.