She looked forward now with almost girlish pleasure to making Helen's acquaintance and winning her affections, as she determined she would try to do; and she was surprised at herself as she felt her spirits rising, and recognized in herself more energy and hopefulness than she had felt for a long time. Time slipped away, weighted though it was with care, and brought no change in Sir Charles Mitford's evil life. The husband and wife rarely met now; and when they did, their casual association was distressing to Lady Mitford, and embarrassing to him. Their wealth, the magnitude and style of their establishment, and the routine of life among persons in their position, afforded them facilities for a complete and tacit estrangement, such as the pressure of narrow circumstances would have rendered impossible. They went their separate ways, and were more strange and distant to each other than the merest surface acquaintances. Lady Mitford was, as it was natural to suppose she would be, the last person to hear particulars of her husband's conduct; but she watched him as closely as her limited opportunities permitted. For some time she had observed that he seemed restless and unhappy, and that the moroseness and discontent, which had been early indications of his relapse from his improved condition, were trying to the household, and, on rare occasions when she had to encounter them, distressing to her. He had no air of triumph now; he had no assured complacency of manner; these were gone, and in their place were the symptoms of suffering, of incertitude, of disappointment. "I suppose she is treating him unkindly," Lady Mitford thought. "It must be something concerning her which is distressing him; he does not care about anything else. He is so infatuated with her now, that I verily believe, when he drinks to the frightful excess he sometimes does, it is to stupify himself between the time he leaves her and the time he sees her again. Poor fellow! poor Charley!" She pitied him now with her good and generous heart. Perhaps the time that she had foreseen was near--the time which she had once hoped for, and now dreaded, though prepared to meet it with all the dutifulness of her nature--the time when the wicked woman who had taken him from her, who had laid the fabric of her happiness low, would tire of him and discard him; and he would seek forgiveness from the wife he had so cruelly wronged.