FIRST of all, weakened in body and mind by an epileptic stroke; then scared literally out of his wits, terrified into a mental and emotional stupor, by the belief that that which we know to have been an epileptic stroke was a visitation from an angry God; a victim, rather than a villain; the creature of disease and superstition, of heredity and education; Elias Bacharach had deserted and forgotten the woman whom he loved, and had allowed himself to be seduced into a marriage with a woman whom he did not love. That a reawakening, accompanied by all the horrors of despair and remorse, should come sooner or later, was, of course, inevitable. It did not come, however, till some nine months after his separation from Christine Redwood, which was some nine months too late. I have in my possession a quantity of manuscript, in Elias's crabbed handwriting, which gives a deep and clear, though fragmentary, insight into the life he led after his marriage. It is in the form of a long, turbulent, and often hysterical letter, addressed by him, under circumstances which will in due time be explained, to Christine--a letter, however, which was never sent--and it bears date February, 1885. I have already made one or two quotations from it. I shall avail myself freely of it in the present chapter. About the relations between himself and Tillie, Elias writes, “there is not much to be said. Our relations were perfectly amicable, but perfectly superficial. Man and wife in name, in reality we were simply good friends; scarcely that, indeed; scarcely more than friendly acquaintances. She was invariably bright, cheerful, amiable, unselfish. I tried to do my duty by her, as I conceived it; to be always kind to her, and to seize every opportunity that I saw to afford her pleasure, or to spare her annoyance. I dare say this was not enough. I dare say she deserved better of me than she got; that I ought to have striven to be her husband in a more genuine and vital sense of the word. But I did not; and if, in this way, I sinned against her, it was at least an unintentional sin, a sin of omission, and one which she remained unaware of. I was egotistical and self-centered, as it is my nature to be. She was not at all exacting. If I would listen to her when she talked, and admire her dresses, and enjoy her playing, and take her to the theater or to parties, she was quite contented. She neither asked, nor appeared to expect, any thing further. So that, though we saw each other every day, and were together a good deal of the time, we were as far as possible from being intimate. Our real, innermost selves never approached each other. In fact, she and my uncle were much more intimate than she and I. He was always having her to sit with him in his study, where he would talk to her of the subjects that interested him, or get her to read aloud to him, or to act as his amanuensis, and write under his dictation. She thought my uncle was a 'perfectly adorable old man';