The terrible thought silenced her. She stopped crying, and a kind of tearless horror and dread came over her face. She was not very wise, but her heart was tender and full of love in its way. What if perhaps this life, which had gone so smoothly over her unthinking head without any complications, should turn out to be a lie, and her happiness a mere delusion? She could not have put her thoughts into words, but the doubt suddenly came over her, putting a stop to all her lamentations. If perhaps Gerald _could_ be happy without the children and herself, what dreadful fiction had all her joy been built upon! Such an inarticulate terror seemed to stop the very beating of her heart. It was not a great calamity only but an overthrowal of all confidence in life; and she shivered before it like a dumb creature piteously beholding an approaching agony which it could not comprehend. The utterance of her distress was arrested upon her lips,--she looked up to her brother with an entreating look, so suddenly intensified and grown desperate that he was startled by it. It alarmed him so much that he turned again to lead her back to her sofa, wondering what momentary passion it could be which had woke such a sudden world of confused meaning in Louisa's eyes. "You may be sure he could not," said the Curate, warmly. "Not happy, certainly; but to men like Gerald there are things in the world dearer than happiness," he said, after a little pause, with a sigh, wondering to himself whether, if Lucy Wodehouse were his, his dearest duty could make him consent to part with her. "If he thinks of such a step, he must think of it as of martyrdom--is that a comfort to you?" he continued, bending, in his pity and wonder, over the trembling wife, who burst forth into fresh tears as he spoke, and forgot her momentary horror.