With what unutterable anguish did she write that name! For some minutes she held the pen suspended before she summoned courage to trace the dreaded characters. Yet why, when her whole letter avowed herself his wife, why fear to write the word? She forced herself to do so; but as she wrote, she felt guilty towards Algernon. She had been so completely in the habit of doing every thing with reference to him, of being guided by him, of acting as if his eye was always upon her, that she thought what would be his emotions, if he saw her thus deliberately deny him! Yet this was indeed her name, and if she avoided it, she might irritate him who was in very truth her husband; him, who had a right at any moment to tear her children from her! She would no longer hesitate—she would not give herself the opportunity of altering the signature; she sealed the letter, she directed it, she enclosed it to her brother, and when all was done, she felt her separation from him she loved more complete than ever. A gush of tenderness came over her soul. If Algernon had at that moment been at her feet, there is no knowing whether she might not have consented to fly with him to the wilds of America, or to any spot on earth where human institutions could not reach. When Algernon arrived at Belhanger, a few days after Ellen’s departure, he lost no time in sending little Agnes to rejoin her mother. He thought the presence of her child,—his child,—might afford her the sensation nearest approaching to pleasure of any thing she was now capable of experiencing. It was not without many a bitter pang that he brought himself to part from the only object that remained to him, of all that a few short weeks ago had made him the happiest man alive. But, in addition to his anxiety to lessen by any means within his power the bitterness of her fate, it is possible that a lingering hope mingled itself, that she could not refuse to let him occasionally see his child, and that he might perhaps thus obtain an interview with herself.