"It is best for you to have gone; to have made for yourself a relief in your man's element of action and struggle. Such a change is happiness, after the misery you have known. It was a bitter schooling; a long siege, and a dreary one; but you have triumphed, and you wear its trophy,--the heroic calm, the mind tranquil with consciousness of power. You have wrung a proud tribute out of sorrow; but has it yielded you all its treasure? Could you but have rested less loftily on your own firm resolve and unbending pride of manhood! Could you but have learned that gentler, deeper, higher philosophy which builds for itself a temple out of ruin, and makes weakness invincible with binding its tendrils to the rock! "Your fate and mine have not been a bed of roses; but the fierceness of yours is past, and I must still wait the issues of mine. I have renounced this fraud and mockery of empty words which was to have bound me to a life-long horror. The world will think very strangely of me. That must be borne, too; and such a load is light, to the burden I have borne already." A few days later, tidings came that Vinal was ill. Edith Leslie rejoined him; but, finding that her presence was any thing but soothing to him, she left him in the care of others, and returned to her friend's house. It was but a sudden and short attack, from which he recovered in a week or two. CHAPTER LXIX. _Fal._--Reason, you rogue, reason; thinkest thou I'll endanger my soul gratis?--_Merry Wives of Windsor_. _Pistol._--Base is the slave that pays.--_Henry V_. Time had been when, his youth considered, Vinal was a beaming star in the commercial heaven. On 'change, "His name was great, In mouths of wisest censure." The astutest broker pronounced him good; the sagest money lender took his paper without a question. But of late, his signature had lost a little of its efficacy. It was whispered that he was not as sound as his repute gave out; that his operations were no longer marked by his former clear-headed forecast; that he was deep in doubtful and dangerous speculation. In short, his credit stood by no means where it had stood a twelvemonth earlier. Possibly these rumors took their first impulse, not on 'change, but at tea tables, and in drawing rooms. His wife's separation from him had given ample food to speculation; and gossip had for once been just, asserting, with few dissenting voices, that there must needs be some fault, and a grave one, on the part of Vinal. The event had ceased to be a very recent one; but surmise was still rife concerning its mysterious cause.