“Heaven knows how long we might have gone on in this way, without sin, if not without treachery to the husband, who cared so little for his wife that it seemed scarcely dishonourable to deceive him. Our fate was precipitated by circumstances. Darcy surprised a little note of mine, asking Evelyn to meet me at a theatre. He attacked his wife brutally, refused to believe anything except the worst. He called her by names that were new and hideous to her ear, and her soul rose up in arms against him. She defied him, ran out of the house, took a cab, and came to my chambers in the foggy November evening. She came to me helpless, friendless, with no one in this wide world to love her or to protect her, except me. This was the turning-point. Of course she could not stay there to be seen by my clerk and my laundress. I took her to Salisbury that night, and we spent a fortnight moving from village to village along the south coast of Devonshire. My hope was that Darcy would apply for a divorce, and that in less than a year I might make the woman I loved my wife. I rejoiced in the thought of his obscurity and hers. The record of the case would pass unnoticed in the papers, and years hence, when I should have made a position at the Bar, nobody need know that the wife I loved and honoured was once the runaway wife of another man. I had argued without allowing for the malignity of a cur. Darcy wrote his wife one of the most diabolical letters that ever was penned by man; he wreaked his venom upon her—upon her, the weaker sinner; he called her by all the vile epithets in his copious vocabulary, and he told her that she should never have the right to the name of an honest woman, for that he would sooner hang himself than divorce her. And so she was to drag her chain for the rest of his days; and so she was to pay the bitter price of having trusted her young life to a low-bred scoundrel.” “Hard luck for both of you,” said Theodore. “Yes, it was indeed hard luck. If you could know how truly and entirely I loved her in those days—how completely happy we should have been in each other’s society, but for the embittering consciousness of our false position. Cut off by his malevolence from escape by divorce, we naturally hoped for a day when we should be released by his death. His habits were not those which conduce to length of years. “We talked of the future—we had our plans and dreams about that life which was to be ours in after-days, when I should be making a large income, and when she would be really my wife. With that hope before her she was content to live in the strictest seclusion, to economize in every detail of our existence, to know no pleasure except that of my society. Never did a handsome woman resign herself to a duller or more unselfish existence—and yet I believe for the first few years she was happy. We were both happy—and we were full of hope.