“How your lips burn!” she cried. “I hope you are not sickening for the plague. I dreamt last night that the contagion had come back; and that our new glass coach was going about with a bell collecting the dead.” “Thou hadst eaten too much supper, sweet. Such dreams are warnings against excess of pies and jellies. Go, love; I have business.” “You have always business now. You used to let me stay with you—even when you was busy,” Henriette remonstrated, dejectedly, as the sonorous oak door closed against her. Fareham flung himself into his chair in front of the large table, with its heaped-up books and litter of papers. Straight before him there lay Milton’s pamphlet—a publication of ten years ago; but he had been reading it only that morning—“The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce.” There were sentences which seemed to him to stand out upon the page, almost as if written in fire; and to these he recurred again and again, brooding over and weighing every word. “….Neither can this law be of force to engage a blameless creature to his own perpetual sorrow, mistaken for his expected solace, without suffering charity to step in and do a confessed good work of parting those whom nothing holds together but this of God’s joining, falsely supposed against the express end of his own ordinance…. ‘It is not good,’ said He, ‘that man should be alone; I will make him a helpmeet for him.’ From which words, so plain, less cannot be concluded, nor is by any learned interpreter, than that in God’s intention a meet and happy conversation is the chiefest and noblest end of marriage…. Again, where the mind is unsatisfied, the solitariness of man, which God had namely and principally ordered to prevent by marriage, hath no remedy, but lies in a worse condition than the loneliest single life; for in single life the absence and remoteness of a helper might inure him to expect his own comforts out of himself, or to seek with hope; but here the continual sight of his deluded thoughts, without cure, must needs be to him, if especially his complexion incline him to melancholy, a daily trouble and pain of loss, in some degree like that which reprobates feel.” He closed the book, and started up to pace the long, lofty room, full of shadow, betwixt the light of the fire and that one pair of candles on his reading desk. “Reprobate! Yes. Am not I a reprobate, and the worst, plotting against innocence? New England,” he repeated to himself. “How much the name promises. A new world, a new life, and old fetters struck off. God, if it could be done! It would hurt no one—no one—except perhaps those children, who might suffer a brief sorrow—and it would make two lives happy that must be blighted else. Two lives! Am I so sure of her? Yes, if eyes speak true. Sure as of my own fond passion. The contagion, quotha! I have suffered that, sweet, and know its icy sweats and parching heats; but ’tis not so fierce a fever as that devilish disease, the longing for your company.”