Twice did Honor Beacham, with eyes blinded by tears, read over this miserable letter, before the whole and entire sense of it came home to her understanding. The shock of hearing of the death, under such pitiful circumstances, of Arthur’s wife, was very great, and the mournful tragedy stood out in terrible and bold relief from amongst the mist and confusion which at first (for Honor’s intellects were then not in the clearest possible condition) seemed to envelope the other portions of Arthur’s letter. But very soon--_too_ soon for the unhappy woman to whom the clearing up of the mystery seemed almost the signal for despair--light dawned upon her bewildered mind, and with a cry of agony, she accused herself aloud as the wretched cause of the young mother’s untimely end. At that moment, in the first keen torture of her self-reproach, she would have hailed as an act of mercy from on high the relief which death, her own death, would have brought to her. Flinging herself on her knees beside the bed, and burying her face in its covering, she strove, but strove in vain, to stifle the violent hysterical sobs that _would_, in spite of all her efforts, force themselves from her ice-cold lips. Ah, Heaven! so the poor tortured creature asked herself, how _could_ she bear the life that was before her--the life burdened with such a dreadful, dreadful weight of guilt? Verily, to use the concluding words of Arthur’s letter, her punishment seemed greater than she could bear--greater by far, in one respect, than that which had overtaken _him_; for while her fellow-culprit could take comfort from the thought that he _might_ have (yet had not) sinned more heavily, she in her despairing humility exaggerated her guilt, and sorrowed as one that had no hope. * * * * *