Step by step she had been retracing her early foolish fondness for the man who had been her husband. How could she have been so blind! she was asking herself. Why could she not have seen him with the eyes of others,--that wise, kindly, far-sighted vision which scanned the present with caution for her sake, and by its gauge measured the future with an unerring and an appalled accuracy? How contemptuously, like a heroine of romance indeed, she had flouted the well-meant opposition of her relatives to her marriage! They had proved wise prophets. Drunkard, gambler, spendthrift, he had wrecked her fortune and embittered her whole life. The two years she had spent with him seemed an æon of misery. They had obliterated the past as well as excluded the future. Somehow she could not look beyond them into her earlier days save upon those gradations of events--the swift courtship, the egregious, headstrong, romantic resolution, the foolish love founded on false ideals which led her at last to the altar, so confiding, so happy, so disdainful of the grave faces and the disapproving shaking heads of all her elder kith and kindred, so triumphant in setting them at naught and enhancing Rufus Gwynn's victory with the quelling of their every claim. In these long, quiet afternoons she would silently canvass humiliating details--when was it that she had first known him for the liar he was; when had she admitted to herself his inherent falsity? Even the truth had faltered for his sake. She had eagerly sought to deceive herself--to gloze over his lies, now told for a purpose, and constrained to their misleading device, now thrown off without intention or effect, as if the false were the more native incident of his moral atmosphere. Perhaps, with the love that possessed her, she, too, might have acquired the proclivity; she meditated on this possibility with a bowed head. At first, when he lied to her, she herself could not distinguish the truth from the false in his words. She had found herself at sea without a rudder. However she might have desired to protect him, whether she might have bent in time to deceit for his sake, there is a sort of monopoly in falsehood. It is a game at which two cannot play to good effect. The first time he struck her full in the face was in the fury which possessed him, when, through her agency, a lie had been fairly fixed upon him. She had given him as her authority for a statement she made to Judge Roscoe, and her uncle had, in repeating it to him, discovered the lie--the blatant open lie--that could not be qualified or gainsaid.