kept upstairs, locking her door, when her husband himself came. No, she would do nothing. She would not go to his friends to be despised. She would not go abroad with him to be miserable. He knew how she hated foreign countries. She would not go home to him, or see him to discuss these questions. He could go where he pleased, she would not put herself in his way. She would not shame him among his fine friends. Nobody should say she was a burden on her husband. It is impossible to imagine anything more confused, more agitated, more feverish than the course of these painful days; but at last it became apparent even to Arthur that this could go on no longer. Many little indications of a state of things which he had never dreamt of, and which was fatal to the self-esteem which is in every man’s bosom, worked on the poor young fellow’s mind as much as the actual grievance of the moment. That he had been thought of as a good match was, perhaps, inevitable in the circumstances; but even that is not agreeable; and to know that your wife has gone to her father’s house to complain of you, is an offence which few men could easily forgive. All this produced in Arthur’s mind an impression of painful unreality in the past than which there is nothing more wounding, more bitter on earth. That love should fail and hearts change is bad enough; but that the love which you have believed in implicitly should never have existed at all, that your affection should have been regarded as a matter of worldly advantage, and your conduct discussed with others, what thought can sting more deeply? It destroyed not only Arthur’s faith in his wife, but his faith in the life they had lived together. Hitherto it had been her too great sincerity, her incapacity for feigning, he thought, poor fellow, which had been their rock ahead. And now was all insincere, was all feigned from beginning to end? His head seemed to turn, and the giddy world to go round with him, and that wrath “which works like madness in the brain,” the wrath which is half love, and which feels every injury with twofold aggravation of resentment, yet yearning, took possession of his mind. It was in this condition that he left Underhayes. Durant had made on Arthur’s behalf the most careful arrangements for Nancy with her father. She was to retain the villa if she chose, and the half of the allowance Sir John gave to his son. Arthur would have given the whole, had that been possible. As it was she would be well off, able to do as she pleased, according to her breeding, to help her family, to occupy an important position among them. The poor young fellow thought with bitterness that this would be more congenial to her than any elevation which could have reached her with him; and perhaps, indeed, there was some reason in this, for the elevations which could reach her as Arthur’s wife were, in a sense, humiliations. Everybody in his rank looked upon her with