"_She had!_" Henrietta repeated impetuously; "she had a broken heart. You never ill-treated her--true; you never neglected her--true,--until she was dying, that is to say;--but did you ever love her, Dr. Wilmot? Did you ever consider her as other or more than an appendage of your position, an ornament in your house, a condition of your social success and respectability? What were her thoughts, her hopes, her disappointments to you? Did you ever make her your real companion, the true sharer of your life? Did you ever return the love, the worship which she gave you? Did you ever pity her jealous nature; did you ever interpret it by any love or sensitiveness of your own, and abstain from wounding it? Did you know, did you care, whether she suffered when you shut yourself up in your devotion to a pursuit in which she had no share? All women have to bear that, no doubt, and are fools if they quarrel with the bread-winner's devotion to his work. Yes; but all women have not her silent, brooding, jealous, sullen nature; all women are not so little frivolous as she was; all women, Dr. Wilmot, do not love their husbands as Mabel loved you." She paused in the torrent of her words, and then he spoke. "All this is new and terrible to me; as new as it is terrible. Mrs. Prendergast, do me the justice to believe that." "It is not for me to do you justice or injustice," she made answer; "your punishment must come from your own heart, or you must go unpunished." "But"--he almost pleaded with her--"Mabel never blamed me, never tried to keep me more with her; rarely indeed expressed a wish of any kind. I declare, before God, I never dreamed, it never occurred to me to suspect that she was unhappy." "No," she said; "and Mabel knew that. She interested you so little, you cared so little for her, that you never looked below the surface of her life; and her pride kept that surface fair and smooth. She would have died before she would have complained,--she has died, in fact, and made no sign." "Yes," said Wilmot suddenly and bitterly; "but she has left me this legacy, brought me by your hands, of miserable regret and vain repentance. She has insured the destruction of my peace of mind; she has taken care that mine shall be no ordinary grief, sent by God and to be dispelled by time; she has added bitterness to the bitter, and put me utterly in the wrong by her unwarrantable concealment and reticence." "How truly manlike your feelings are, Dr. Wilmot! She has hurt your pride, and you can't forgive her even in death! She has put _you_ in the wrong,--and all her own wrongs, so silently borne, sink into nothing in comparison!" "I deny it!" Wilmot said vehemently; "she _had_ no wrongs,--no woman of her acquaintance had a better husband. What did I ever deny her?" "Only your love, only a wife's true place in your life, only all she longed for, only all she died for lack of."