Oliver Constable had not the most distant thought that Harry Stanhope could have grossly ill-treated his wife. Oliver would as soon have suspected Harry of lifting up his strong right arm to strike down Horace unresisting under the pacific influence of his devotion. It is your poor half-brutal coal-heaver who ordinarily adds kicks to curses, where his wife is concerned. As a rule, though certainly not without exceptions, centuries of refining civilisation and liberal education remove Harry’s whole class from committing such outrages. Harry Stanhope, with his graciousness in an entirely muddled condition, might challenge a muscular ostler to a round in the noble art of self-defence. He was known to have taken the law into his own hands and knocked down a ruffian who was belabouring a child and insulting an old woman. But he had probably hardly ever spoken a rough word to Fan, whom he had held in the greatest respect ever since he had known her, though she had become powerless to make a man of him, as he had proposed. She was not silly, or bumptious, or trying in any way so as to provoke the wrath which had originally been a rare experience with Harry. But not the less he had slain her faith in him, by his hopeless levity and folly, which were tending unmistakably to animal indulgence and besotted excess. He had not destroyed one atom of her love—else Fan’s heart too might have died within her in its cold emptiness, but, at least, it would not have been wrung with the intolerable pang of loving him to death and beyond death, yet seeing him go down, in spite of her, to the place of dragons. There are students of humanity who positively state that a good man or woman’s love must inevitably perish with the loss of esteem. If so, the best human love must be singularly unlike Divine love as it is revealed to us. And it is one thing voluntarily to give love to a creature whose repulsive moral disease is evident and undeniable, and has already penetrated and poisoned the nature through and through—and quite another to have loved the same creature in the beauty and glory of sound mortal health, with but the seeds of fatal disease, only to be detected by the wise physician, lurking in the system, and having once loved to turn with loathing abhorrence and absolute rejection, from the sick man, when his weakness has found him out, his sore ancestral malady has laid fast hold of him, and he is fighting a desperate battle for life or death.