“Perhaps only a refined and highly educated woman could have devised so refined a punishment. ‘Let me live near you,’ she pleaded; ‘let me live at the gate of the park I loved so well when I was a child—let me see you pass sometimes—open the gate for you and just see you go by—without a word, without a look even upon your part. It will be some consolation for me in my lonely, loveless life. I shall know that at least I am not forgotten.’ Forgotten? as if it had been possible for me to forget, in the happiest circumstances, even if she had made for herself a home at the farthest extremity of Europe, or in the remotest of our colonies. As it was, her presence embittered the place I loved—the great reward and aim of my life. Her shadow fell across my young wife’s pathway—her influence darkened all my days.” He began to pace up and down the little room with a feverish air. He seemed to find a sort of relief in talking of this burden which he had borne so long in secret—borne with a smile upon his lips, suffering that silent agony which strong men have borne again and again in the history of mankind, carrying their silent punishment upon them till the grave revealed the hidden canker, and laid bare the festering wound which had rankled unsuspected by the world. “She was cruelly treated by her husband, Theodore. A young and beautiful woman, married to a profligate and a sot. It had been a love-match, as the world calls it—that is to say, a marriage brought about by a schoolgirl’s impatience to break her bonds, and a woman’s first delight in hearing herself called beautiful. She had flung herself away upon a handsome reprobate; and three or four years after marriage she found herself alone and neglected in a shabby lodging in one of the squalidest streets off the Strand. I can see the wretched rooms she lived in, to-day, as I stand here—the lodging-house furniture, the dingy curtains darkening the dirty windows looking into the dirty street. What a home for youth and beauty!” He paused, with an impatient sigh, took another turn across the narrow space, and then resumed: