"I never ought to have married her," said the voice of conscience, breathing its secrets from the cautious depths of his inmost heart. "Every law, human and divine, should have warned me against it. I was infatuated to blindness: nay, not to blindness; I cannot plead that: but to folly. It was very wrong: it was horribly sinful: and heaven is justly punishing me. The fault was mine: I might have kept aloof from her after that miserably eventful night. I ought to have done so; to have held her at more than arm's distance evermore. Ought!--lives there another man on the face of the earth, I wonder, who would not? The fault of our union was mine wholly, not hers; and so, whatsoever trials she brings on me I will bear, patiently, as I best may. _I_ sought _her_. She would never have dared to seek me, after that night and the discovery I made the day subsequently in poor John's room: and the complication of ill arising, or to arise, from our marriage, _I_ have to answer for. I am nearly tired of the inward warfare: three years of it! Three years and more, since I committed the mad act of tying myself to her for life: for better or for worse: and it has been nothing for me but one prolonged, never-shifting scene of self-repentance. We are wearing a mask to each other: God grant that I may go to my grave without being forced to lift it! For her sake; for her sake!" He paused to raise his hat from his brow and wipe the sweat that had gathered there. And then he took a step forward and a step backward in the dim shade. But he could not drive away, even for a moment, the care ever eating away his heart, or turn his vision from the threatening shadow that always seemed looming in the distance. "Of all the wild infatuation that ever took possession of the heart of man for woman, surely mine for Louisa Joliffe was the worst! Did Satan lead me on? It must have been so. 'Be sure your sin shall find you out.' Since that fatal moment when I stood at the altar with her, those ominous words have never, I think, been quite absent from my memory. Every hour of my life, every minute of the day and night as they pass, does my sin find me. Knowing what I did know, could I not have been content to let her go her own way, while I went mine? Heaven help me! for I love her yet, as man rarely has loved. And when my father, or any other, casts a reflection on her, it is worse to me than a dagger's thrust. So long as I may, I will shield her from----" It was at this moment that the soliloquy, so pregnant with weighty if vague revelation, was broken in upon by Mr. Roland Yorke. Little guessed careless Roland what painful regrets he had put a temporary stop to. Bede, as was previously seen, went indoors, and Roland departed with Miss Channing on her evening visit, dismissing Dalla without the smallest ceremony. The carriage, to convey Mrs. Bede Greatorex and her friends abroad, drove up. Bede, somewhat neglectful of the rest, came out with his wife, and placed her in it.