“Thank you,” said Geoffrey. But on his heart the girl’s words fell with a strange chill. “She had not been alarmed,” this wife of his. It had been then so easy to prevent her feeling anxiety about him, that even this girl, a stranger almost to her, felt instinctively that the extreme coolness of the young wife at such a time, called loudly for some sort of excuse, some palliation of what to those about her had evidently looked very like utter heartlessness and indifference to his fate. “If only they knew the whole,” he said to himself, “they would not wonder at her unnatural behaviour. ‘Alarmed’ about me! No indeed! The saddest sight that can meet her eyes will be my returning alive and well.” And with this bitterness in his heart, he followed Margaret to the drawing-room in quest of Marion. What evil spirit of pride and unlovely perversity had been whispering to her? And why, oh! why had she listened to its voice, wilfully stifling the pleadings of her gentle woman’s heart, and deliberately destroying what might have been the happy, softening influences of the day’s occurrences? Much doubtless of the miserable state of things between these two, bound together by the closest, most sacred of ties, they—she—was not to be blamed for. “Circumstances”—the only name we, in our ignorance, can find for the mysterious combinations which destroy the lives of so many—“circumstances” in great part, were the scape-goat in the case of the great mistake of Marion’s life. She had meant to do right, poor child, and had tried her best to execute her intention. Terrible mistakes we are all apt to make, the wisest of us perhaps more than the humbler and less confident. But for such, though the temporal punishment is often disproportionately heavy, in higher tribunals we are leniently judged. Not so with deliberate acts of cruelty and unkindness to each other, such as Marion Baldwin was this evening guilty of. She knew what she was about; she knew, though possibly she would not have owned it to herself, that she wished to wound Geoffrey, deliberately meant and intended to punish for some offence towards herself which she would have found it difficult to define, the heart whose only blame, if blame it were, was its too great devotion to her. She was angry with herself for having been frightened about him, mortified, though yet her relief was real, at the matter-of-fact conclusion of what she had been picturing to herself as a crisis in her fate. So, after the manner of people when angry with themselves, she did her best to make another as unhappy as herself.