he should be leaving England with his wife. His wife! Oh, terrible word! Oh, awful, impossible fate! This sudden realisation of what was before him made his mind start like a restive horse, and he found himself once more before that blank wall. It would be his duty to do it, and he could not do it. He did not trifle with himself nor elude this question any more than he would deceive the woman he loved. He looked out upon what was before him, and he said to himself that he could not do it--he could not pretend to do it. Other men might have the courage to struggle, but not he. There was only the coward’s remedy remaining to him, only the base man’s way--to turn and flee. He had written it all in his letter to Ford, although it seemed to him that when he wrote that letter he had not so clearly perceived that there was only one thing to do. He had bidden his brother-in-law to secure a living somehow for this wretched creature who bore his name, to use the little he would leave for her, and to eke it out--or finally, with the boldness of a man whom earthly motives had ceased to sway, to put this last inconceivable legacy into the hands of Grace. ‘I know she will do it,’ he had said. He knew she would do it, God bless her! She would understand why of all terrible things he dared to ask that of her; and she would do it. That was all there could be to arrange before-- Oliver was not of that mind that is the mode of the present moment. He was no doubter. He believed in the canon ‘gainst self-slaughter, as well as in righteousness and judgment to come; but there is something in the unutterable sensations with which a man finds himself thus placed before evils which are too many for him, driven to the last extremity, and unable to move one way or other, which works a strange change upon the mind on this as on other matters of faith. When we are doing any act in our own person, it seems so much less strange to us, so much more natural, than when we contemplate it from the point of view of another man. He did not think either of the sin or of the cowardice. He thought only of the last resort, the last way of escape from that which was intolerable, which was more than man could bear. To describe the way by which a man comes to this point, to entertain the idea of ending his own life, is impossible. Those who are brought so far seldom survive to tell how it has been. It seemed to Oliver something like the arising and going to the Father of the prodigal. God, it seemed to him, would understand it all; the confusion in his soul, the intolerableness, the impossibility. If anyone else misunderstood, God would understand; and as for the punishment that might follow, he thought that he could take that like a man. No punishment could be equal to this. He would say that he did not mean to avoid punishment, that he was ready for anything, only not this; not the ghastly life which was insupportable, not the falsehood, not the treachery. Suffering, honest