The long strain had snapped the strings of the fine instrument at last. She cried for Harry day and night, in his sight and hearing. As she cried she broke the silence which she had only once before stirred in order to claim succour for him; she poured forth in full measure her incalculable sufferings. She lived over again to one appalled auditor the long nights when she had sat listening for a footstep which never came, but was replaced by other footsteps, each, in its turn, causing her heart to bound with unwarrantable expectation, and sink in the sickness—growing always deadlier, of hope deferred; till it seemed as if all the footsteps which approached and departed in ignorance and indifference, trod, deliberately and mercilessly, over her quivering heart, spurning it as they passed. She showed how the truest woman in the world had been fain to impose upon herself with miserable deceptions, before she had confessed, in the secrecy of her own soul, that the fine gold of her idol was only base clay under its lacquer—how the most straightforward and sincere of human beings had been driven to play at the wretched game of keeping up appearances, of laying herself out to hoodwink her neighbors. She had been humbled in the dust as well as worn out by ceaseless struggles, and tortured to frenzy. Her sleep had gone from her eyes. Peace had been unknown to her—a God-fearing, Christ-loving woman. The revelation was like the opening of those Books before which every son of man will smite his breast and call on the mountains to fall upon him and the hills to cover him. And Harry Stanhope’s accuser, day and night, before God and his brethren, was the woman who loved him best, and would sooner have bitten her tongue out than said the lightest word to blame him. Every effort was made to withdraw Harry from the awful, ghastly ordeal. The instant Horace guessed instinctively what Fan was speaking of incessantly in the monotonous voice as tuneless as his own, which he could no longer catch so as to distinguish the words, he started forward with fury, as if he were mad himself, to drag Harry away; but Harry shook his brother off. Oliver laid a firm hand on Harry’s shoulder, but from that, too, Harry freed himself. ‘Let me alone, Constable,’ he gasped. ‘My place is by my wife, and whatever I have done or left undone, I will stay with her and hear the last she has to say to me.’ None could dispute his right, and the men drew back; but there were still women’s pitiful voices beseeching him to have mercy on himself. ‘Go away, sir, for Heaven’s sake—for her sake. She does not mean it; she does not know what she is saying. Your staying will do no good.’