She thought thus mournfully of her own lot, and condemned herself for faults she had not committed; she thought of Alsager, and took herself to task because she could not repress or deny the keen and compensating joy which the knowledge that he loved her gave; she thought of her husband with infinite compassion, with apprehension, and with hopelessness. The downward course had been run with awful rapidity by Sir Charles Mitford. Since he had discarded the gentle influence of Georgie, the benignant restraint, the touch of higher aspiration, and purer tastes had vanished, and he had returned to all the low habits and coarse vices of his earlier career. Georgie knew this vaguely, and she experienced all the horror and disgust which were natural to such a mind as hers. At first, when she recognized in the fullest extent the fact of her husband's infatuation with Mrs. Hammond, she could not understand why he should not be restrained by that passion, as he had been by his evanescent love for herself, from coarse and debasing pleasures. But she soon found out, by the light of her clear perceptions and the aid of her intuitive refinement of mind, how widely different were the sentiments which she had ignorantly compared; and learned that while there is no temporal salvation for a man so powerful as love, there is no swifter or surer curse and ruin than an illicit passion. When Georgie came to understand this fully, her apprehensions concerning her husband reached a height of intensity which would have been unreasonable, had she not possessed the painful knowledge of what his former career had been. She had hardly understood it at the time indeed, and her father had softened matters down very much, partly through the invincible amiability of his own disposition, and partly because he believed, in simple sincerity, that all "Charley's" misbehaviour had been caused by want of money alone; and that once rich, and holding a responsible position, he would not again be assailed by temptations to disreputable conduct. Whence it is presumable that the good parson knew a great deal more of the next world than he knew of this.