She told me; he had gone to a lawyer's in Cambridge, about some justice business--nothing that could detain him; I said nothing more, except to bid her be careful of baby, whom I had never before left so long as I most likely should leave him now. Then I hastened away. The winter noon was bright, the road crisp and white with frost, the air exhilarating and joyous. I leaned forward at the carriage window, looking out eagerly, if perhaps I might meet him returning; but the only person I saw was Saville, his enemy, pacing up and down the lane between the rectory and Cottiswoode, waiting, as I supposed, to see me. The sight of this man brought my emotion to a climax. Any one who knows what anxiety is, will readily know that I had already leaped the depths of a dozen calamities--accident, illness, death itself--which might have happened to my husband--and when it occurred to me now, that I might be going to his sick-bed or his death-bed, with these papers which pretended to prove that he was not what he seemed, folded into my hand, I scarcely could bear the intolerable thought. I could not venture to anticipate how he would receive me if downfall came to him. I had deprived myself of all that generous joy of helping and lightening which might have given a certain pleasure to a good wife even in her husband's misfortune. I!--I dared not be generous to Edgar--dared not appear to come closer to him in his humiliation, if humiliation there was. I went on blindly in a kind of agony, scarcely venturing to think how I should speak, or what I should do. If anything had happened to Edgar--any of those physical misfortunes which people speak of, as calling forth the disinterested and unselfish devotion of women, what could I do, who, all these weary months, had been resenting so bitterly his disinterested affection for me? And if Saville was right--if I, and not Edgar, was the true heir after all, how would it become me to rejoice as any other wife could have done, in the certainty that all that was mine, was his as well. In a moment our positions were changed. I thought of my husband--Edgar--Harry! as a poor man, having no title to anything save through his wife. I thought of him solitary and in suffering, able to make no exertion for himself, depending for all care and tenderness upon me. Heaven help me! this was the recompense I had labored to secure for myself; our positions were changed; and how could I dare to offer to him the same love and benefits which I had rejected so bitterly when he offered them to me?