I hardly think this first phase of her suffering, though acute almost to agony, was after all the worst. There is a great compensatory power in strong excitement—the after days of grey depression are to my thinking the most to be dreaded. On these she was now entering; for though she knew it not, the full strength of his immediate influence was already beginning to fade. The entering on a new life, the return to scenes with which he was in no wise associated, had much to do with this. Still, at times the first sharp agony returned to her; but generally when roused by some external agency. The sight of any silly trifling thing associated with him—a book out of which he had read to her, hand-writing resembling his, even little details of dress recalling him—all had power to stab her. Ah, yes! Even to the day of her death she felt that the scent of honeysuckle would be to her unendurable, for that fatal day in his excitement Ralph had plucked a spray off the luxuriant branches overhanging the old arbour, and ruthlessly crushing it in his hands, the strong, almost too sweet perfume had reached her as she sat before him. But these acute sensations gradually grew to be of rarer occurrence; very possibly, had her new life at the Manor Farm been fuller and more congenial, had Geoffrey been more experienced, less humble, and perhaps less unselfish, at this crisis things might have mend. By allowing her to see that, notwithstanding all that had passed he yet loved her as fervently as before, that yet she was to him a very necessity of his being; the husband might gradually have drawn her out of herself and eventually led her at once to cling to and support, the man who truly, as he had once said, found “life without her” a very mockery of the word. But Geoffrey could not do this. He pitied her too much; he hated himself for what he had brought upon her. He went to the extreme of fancying himself actually repulsive to her. He guarded himself from the slightest word or sign of familiarity or affection, imagining that the revulsion these would engender would drive them yet further and more hopelessly apart.