Was it strange, knowing what he did? Martin thought not; but he did not speak. 'He was thinking of that poor girl, I suppose,' murmured Alice, half to herself; 'thinking of all the troubles and sufferings she had come through; thinking, I shouldn't wonder, that they might have been mine, if I had not been mercifully placed in a different position, and out of the reach of temptation; for he had the tenderest heart, and he loved me so dearly--O so dearly! that the mere thought of anything happening to me to cause me pain or suffering, was enough to make him utterly wretched.' Then the sense of her situation dawning again upon her, she cried out: 'And now he is lost to me for ever! There is no one now to think of or take care of me! We were all in all to each other, and now I am left alone in the world; what shall I do, O, what shall I do!' It had been Martin Gurwood's lot, in the discharge of his clerical duties, to listen a hundred times in his life to this despairing wail from women just robbed of their husbands by death: a hundred times had he cheered the darkened and dispirited soul with recapitulations of the Almighty goodness, with the hope that the parting from the loved and lost one was but temporary and not of long duration, and that in the future the two reunited might enjoy an eternity of bliss such as they had never known before. What could he say to the woman now writhing before him in misery and despair? What word of encouragement, what scrap of hope could he whisper into her dulled ear? How could he, with the fearful knowledge which he had acquired, speak to her of the future of this man, whose memory she so blindly worshipped, ignorant of the manner in which he had basely betrayed her? How could he even speak kindly of the dead man's past, and echo the terms of affection in which she mentioned him, knowing as he did the full measure of the deceit and iniquity practised upon her by the man whom she imagined to have been her husband?