"Has this struck you now for the first time?" she asks, drily. "I am not aware of any change in our relative circumstances since our marriage was arranged; I suppose our feelings towards each other are much what they were then, when you were troubled with none of these scruples." "And what _were_ our feelings then?" he asks, bitterly; "what brought us together? Was not it that our properties dovetailed conveniently into one another, as Sir Thomas says--that it was advisable for both of us to marry some one--that we were of suitable age, and had no positive distaste for one another: was not this so?" "I suppose so," she answers, sulkily. "And yet," he continues, sternly, "although I had laid bare to you all my wretched story--although you were well aware that I was utterly without the safeguard of any love to yourself--you yet let me fall into this temptation--the cruelest I could have been exposed to--without a word of warning. Was this fair? Was this right?" "Since you put me on my defence," she answers, with anger, "I must repeat to you what I said before, that it seemed to me the best method of curing you of your ill-placed fancy for Esther Craven--a fancy which she repaid with such disgraceful deceit and duplicity--was to let you see for yourself what a wreck she had become!" "You meant well, perhaps," he rejoins, with a sigh that is more than half a groan; "but it was terribly mistaken--terribly ill-judged; it has done us both an irreparable injury." "I am not aware that it has done me any injury whatever," she answers, coldly, mistaking his meaning "I was not alluding to you," he replies, curtly. She makes no rejoinder, and he, rising, begins to walk up and down the room with his hands in his pockets. He has made his meaning clear enough, surely, and yet she does not appear to see it. As she continues resolutely silent, he stops opposite to her, and speaks earnestly, and yet with some embarrassment, as one who knows that what he says will be unpleasing to his listener. "Constance, I must tell you the truth, though I suppose it is hardly of the complexion of the pretty flattering truths or untruths that you have been used to all your life. But, at least, it is better that you should hear it now, than that we should tell it one another a year hence, with mutual, useless recriminations; there is no use in disguising the fact that you and I do not feel towards each other as husband and wife should feel." "Pshaw!" she says, pettishly, turning her head aside; "we feel much the same as other people do, I daresay."