having a divorce-law for the husband which
was not also a divorce-law for the wife. The
writer in the Times boldly and eloquently
exposed this discreditable anomaly in the
administration of justice; hinted delicately
at the unutterable wrongs suffered by Mrs.
Duncan; and plainly showed that she was
indebted to the accident of having been
married in Scotland, and to her consequent
right of appeal to the Scotch Tribunals, for
a full and final release from the tie that
bound her to the vilest of husbands, which
the English law of that day would have
mercilessly refused.

He read that. Other men might have
gone on to the narrative extracted from the
Scotch newspaper. But at the last word of
the article he stopped. The newspaper, and
the unread details which it contained, lost
all hold on his attention in an instant, and,
in their stead, living and burning on his
mind, like the Letters of Doom on the wall
of Belshazzar, there rose up in judgment
againt him the last words of a verse in the
Gospel of Saint Luke. "Whosoever marrieth
her that is put away from her husband
committeth adultery." He had preached from
these words. He had warned his hearers,
with the whole strength of the fanatical
sincerity that was in him, to beware of
prevaricating with the prohibition which that
verse contained, and to accept it as literally,
unreservedly, finally forbidding the marriage
of a divorced woman. He had insisted on
that plain interpretation of plain words in
terms which had made his congregation
tremble. And now, he stood alone in the
secresy of his own chamber, self-convicted of
the deadly sin that he had denounced—he
stood, as he had told the wicked among his
hearers that they would stand, at the Last
Day, before the judgment Seat.

He was unconscious of the lapse of time;
he never knew whether it was many minutes
or few before the door of his room was
suddenly and softly opened. It did open—and
his wife came in.

In her white dress, with a white shawl
thrown over her shoulders; her dark hair,
so neat and glossy at other times, hanging
tangled about her colourless cheeks, and
heightening the glassy brightness of terror
in her eyes—so he saw her; the woman put
away from her husband, the woman whose
love had made his life happy and had stained
his soul with a deadly sin.

She came on to within a few paces of him,
without a word, or a tear, or a shadow of
change passing over the dreadful rigidity of
her face. She looked at him with a strange
look; she pointed to the newspaper crumpled
in his hand, with a strange gesture; she
spoke to him in a strange voice.

"You know it!" she said.

His eyes met hers—she shrank from them
—turned—and laid her arms and her head
heavily against the wall.

"O, Alfred! " she said, " I was so lonely
in the world, and I was so fond of you!"

The woman's delicacy, the woman's
trembling tenderness welled up from her
heart, and touched her voice with a tone of
its old sweetness, as she murmured these
simple words. She said no more. Her
confession of her fault, her appeal to their past
love for pardon, were both poured forth in
that one sentence. She left it to his own
heart to tell him the rest. How anxiously
her vigilant love had followed his every
word and treasured up his every opinion, in
the days when they first met; how weakly
and falsely, and yet with how true an affection
for him, she had shrank from the disclosure
which she knew but too well would
have separated them even at the church
door; how desperately she had fought against
the coming discovery which threatened to
tear her from the bosom she clung to, and to
cast her out into the world with the shadow
of her own shame to darken her lonely
life to the end—all this she left him to
feel; for the moment which might part
them for ever was the moment when she
knew best how truly, how passionately he
had loved her.

His lips trembled as he stood looking at
her in silence; and the slow, burning tears
dropped heavily, one by one, down his cheeks.
The natural human remembrance of the
golden days of their companionship, of the
nights and nights when that dear head—
turned away from him, now, in unutterable
misery and shame—had nestled itself so
fondly and so happily on his breast, fought
hard to silence his conscience, to root out his
dreadful sense of guilt, to tear the words of
Judgment from their ruthless hold on his
mind, to claim him in the sweet names of
Pity and of Love. If she had turned and
looked at him, at that moment, their next
words would have been spoken in each
other's arms. But the oppression of her
despair under his silence was too heavy for
her; and she never moved.

He forced himself to look away from her;
he struggled hard to break the silence
between them.

"God forgive you, Emily!" he said.

As her name passed his lips his voice
failed him, and the torture at his heart burst
its way out in sobs. He hurried to the door
to spare her the terrible reproof of the grief
that had now mastered him. When he passed
her, she turned towards him with a faint
cry.

He caught her as she sank forward, and
saved her from dropping on the floor. For
the last time his arms closed round her. For
the last time, his lips touched hers—cold
and insensible to him now. He laid her on
the sofa, and went out.

One of the female servants was crossing
the hall. The girl started as she met him,
and turned pale at the sight of his face. He