“I have borne so much, great God. I have borne so much. Oh, I have been a woman ‘of sorrows and acquainted with grief.’ And who is it that has made my life, my harmless life, one long pain? You, General Garnet, you. You married me by force, you know you did. In my young girlhood—nay, in my innocent childhood, when life opened to me with such a bright promise of usefulness and happiness with one I loved, with one to whom my faith was plighted, you tore me away from that one, and made his life a useless, barren waste, and married me yourself, for your own selfish purposes, and nearly broke my heart and crazed my brain. God knows I have no clear recollection now of the months that followed my marriage. Well! Well! Well! ‘Time and the hour beareth away all things,’ and as time passed, I learned to love you. Because you were my husband, and the father of my child, and because it was the great necessity of my nature to love, I loved you. God knows, I think there was no other reason. Oh, if Heaven gave me one idea purer and higher than all the rest, it was that of the beauty and holiness of marriage! And though mine was a miserable sacrifice, so great was my need to live in an atmosphere of love and piety, that I tried to make a sort of temple of it. It was a wild ruin. Oh, worse! it was a ridiculous failure! This hour has proved it. Ha! ha! ha! Hark! did I laugh? No, it was not I. I have nothing to laugh at in earnest, and I never laugh in scorn. But there are two spirits in me now, and one mocks at the other.” “Sit down, this moment, sit down!” thundered General Garnet, stamping furiously. “But heedless as the dead was she Of all around, above, beneath!” Of all but the stormy outpouring of thought and feeling, from her own over-burdened heart and brain.