During the hour which she passed watching his slumbers, she seemed to live a long life of bitter and confused thoughts, and she was unutterably relieved when the entrance of the physician enabled her to make her escape, and to lock herself into her room, there to meditate on the past, the present, and the future. On looking back she remembered a thousand circumstances which to her unsuspicious mind had seemed of no import at the time, but which now proved to her that this connexion was one of some standing. She remembered having heard persons allude to debates in the House of Lords, at which he had been obliged to confess he had not been present, although he had been absent from her all the evening. She remembered how little she had seen of him during her confinement; she looked at the fatal letter, and felt certain she had often seen notes in the same hand-writing, and she became more and more indignant to think she had long been a neglected, an injured, and a duped wife. She recollected the rigid notions of female propriety which he professed; she thought the care he had taken of her morals, the censorship which he exercised over the books she read, an insulting mockery. She could almost smile in bitterness at his having forbidden her reading Delphine, and made her return Adam Blair to the library,—and at the remark he made to some one who wondered she had never yet read _La Nouvelle Heloise_—that he was surprised at any woman who had read the first three lines of the introduction owning she had read any further. “And I was grateful to him,” she thought, “for thus watching over me. I fancied it argued affection for me, and a love of virtue in himself, while he was thus treating me like a fool, and laughing at his childish dupe! No wonder he wished to preserve the ignorance which was so convenient to him. This taste for purity in which I so rejoiced, was but the veil to conceal his own vice. And I am bound for life to this man. I must drag on a weary existence, forced, Heaven knows how unwillingly, to break my marriage vow; for how can I love, how can I honour, what I despise and condemn?” Floods of tears came to the relief of her bursting heart and bursting head. She wept, till she was once more calm, and could look with some degree of composure upon the actual position in which she was placed.