“O me unhappy! I have found them lying Close in each other’s arms and fast asleep. But that I would not damn two precious souls, Bought with my Saviour’s blood, and send them, laden With all their scarlet sins upon their backs, Unto a fearful judgment, their two lives Had met upon my rapier.” Then, with a passionate stretching forth of his desire toward the impossible, which reveals the whole depth of his tenderness, he cries:-- “O God! O God! that it were possible To undo things done; to call back yesterday! That Time could turn up his swift sandy glass, To untell the days, and to redeem these hours! Or that the sun Could, rising from the west, draw his coach backward, Take from the account of time so many minutes, Till he had all these seasons called again, Those minutes, and those actions done in them, Even from her first offence; that I might take her As spotless as an angel in my arms! But oh! I talk of things impossible, And cast beyond the moon. God give me patience! For I will in and wake them.” The following scene, in which Frankford pleads with his guilty and conscience-stricken wife, is full of pathos. Its passion is simple and homefelt. Each question asked by Frankford is such as a wronged husband has the right to ask. Each answer given by the wife is broken in mere monosyllables more eloquent than protestation. We feel the whole, because not a word is strained or far-fetched, because the tenderness of Frankford is not merely sentimental, because he does not rave or tear his passion to tatters; finally, because in the profundity of his grief he still can call his wife by her pet name. Mrs. Frankford is no Guinevere, nor, again, like Alice in _Arden of Feversham_, is she steeled and blinded by an overwhelming passion. Heywood fails to realise her character completely, producing, as elsewhere in his portraits of women, a weak and vacillating picture. She changes quite suddenly from love for her newly-wedded lord to light longing for Wendoll, and then back again to the remorse which eats her life away. Wendoll is drawn more powerfully. We see the combat in his soul between the sense of duty to his benefactor and the love which invades him like an ocean, drowning all the landmarks he had raised to warn him from the perilous ground. Adultery has been three times treated by Heywood. In _The English Traveller_ Mrs. Wincott sins with the same limp and unexplained facility as Mrs. Frankford. In _Edward IV._ Jane Shore is meant to raise the same sentimental pity as Mrs. Frankford on her death-bed.