Gone in scorn! Gone in loathing! Gone to return no more but as a stranger! Oh, insupportable grief! Oh, hopeless anguish! Oh, despair! A few short weeks ago the heaven of her life had been so serene, so divinely serene, and her soul had reflected back the beautiful “great calm,” as a still lake the clear sky. Now all was changed! Now all was clouds and storm and darkness! A howling wilderness around! A howling tempest overhead! And her soul answered back the tempestuous discord of life, as the storm-tossed ocean, the storm-lowered sky! All was confusion, distraction, chaos! Wild impulses—suggestions of the fiend—darted meteor-like athwart her mind:—to fly—to go away and leave a place, where she had been brought a bride, full of love and hope and trust, and where every feeling of womanly pride and delicacy had been ruthlessly, insultingly trampled in the dust! But simultaneously with this suggestion, arose the instinct of the wife, and the inspiration of the Christian, teaching her that scorned and outraged as she had been, her only post of duty as of _hope_, was her husband’s home. Yes, amid all the gloom and terror, she caught this one glimpse of Heaven. Amid all the clash and clang of passion and despair, she heard this voice of God. CHAPTER XXXIV. CATHERINE’S REGENCY. But a trouble weighed upon her, And perplexed her night and morn, With the burden of a station Unto which she was not born.—TENNYSON