There is something always unfavourable to virtuous happiness in the _voluntary_ absence of a wife from her husband, and especially if she has designedly or carelessly, from vanity or _désœuvrement_, given encouragement to marked attentions from any other than her husband. Whatever may be alleged by some, that absence makes meeting sweeter, and renovates affection, it may be laid down as a rule well known to experience, that genuine wedded love is best maintained by that sweet habitude which renders each a part of the other, and which feels not that it can live separate from that dearer self; and happy, and only truly happy, are those married persons who, in an honest heart, feel that they can add to love virtue, and to virtue habit; so that, when long years have gone by as a tale that is told, they can look back upon their course with joy, and feel it dearer as they know it to have been hallowed by the _lungo costume_ and the _dolce memorie_. _Unnecessary_ absences, on the contrary, between married persons, are at best very dangerous experiments: they induce in women an independence of feeling inimical to tenderness, and incompatible with the duties of a wife; and encourage, on the part of others, an intimacy and a freedom of manner, to the abandonment of those forms which, in the presence of the husband, would perhaps be observed. Thus it was in the case of Lady Glenmore. Mr. Leslie Winyard, already too much encouraged by her easy good-nature and affability, impelled by vanity to suppose himself irresistible when he chose to give himself the trouble of being so, and not wholly indifferent to her whom he now pursued, considered Lady Glenmore's absence from England as intended to afford an opportunity for the furtherance of their intimacy. The mode of life at Spa, and similar places on the continent, where the English congregate, however resembling the empty folly of London in its moral effect, differs in this respect, that it is more like living in a family circle, divested of the ceremonious restraints of societies in great cities. The daily routine of arrangements which threw all those who circled together into an unavoidable familiarity, the long excursions during the day, the repose under some shade after fatigue, the return at night, the supper, the dance that not unfrequently followed, proved all of them too favourable opportunities for a man of intrigue. If, therefore, Lady Glenmore was in peril, when guarded by the forms of society, in the presence of a husband whom she loved, and feeling the wholesome moral check which, to a young mind entering on the snares of life, the consciousness of a supposed cognizance of parents and friends so usefully imposes,--if, under all these circumstances of protection, she had yielded to, or rather been entangled in, an indiscretion respecting her intimacy with Mr. Leslie Winyard,--how much more fearful was her present danger, when no restraints of the kind were at hand to guard or to warn her!