done for ten whole years."

"Oh, Eben! I don't think it would be right," cried Hetty. "It would be a
lie."

"A lie!" ejaculated her husband, scornfully. Poor Hetty! The bitter
harvest of her wrong deed was garnered for her, poured upon her head at
every turn, by the pitilessness of events. Inexorable seasons, surer
than any other seed-time and harvest, are those uncalendared seasons in
which souls sow and reap with meek patience.

Hetty replied:

"I know I have lived, acted, told a lie, Eben. Don't taunt me with it.
How can you, if you really believe all I have told you of the reasons
which led me to it?"

"My Hetty," said Dr. Eben, "I don't taunt you with it. I do believe all
you have told me. I do know that you did it for love of me, monstrous
though it sounds to say so. But when you refuse now to do the only thing
which seems to me possible to be done to repair the mistake, and say
your reason for not doing it is that it would be a lie, how can I help
pointing back to the long ten years' lie you have lived, acted, told? If
your love for me bore you up through that lie, it can bear you up
through this."

"Shall we never go home, Eben?" asked Hetty sadly.

"To Welbury? to New England? never!" replied her husband with a terrible
emphasis. "Never will I take you there to draw down upon our heads all
the intolerable shame, and gossiping talk which would follow. I tell
you, Hetty, you are dead! I am shielding your name, the name of my dead
wife! You don't seem to comprehend in the least that you have been dead
for ten years. You talk as if it would be nothing more to explain your
reappearance than if you had been away somewhere for a visit longer than
you intended."

The longer they discussed the subject, the more vehement Dr. Eben grew,
and the feebler grew Hetty's opposition. She could not gainsay his
arguments. She had nothing to oppose to them, except her wifely instinct
that the old bond and ceremony were by implication desecrated in
assuming a second: "But what right have I to fall back on that old
bond," thought poor Hetty, wringing her hands as the burden of her long,
sad ten years' mistake weighed upon her.

Not until Hetty had yielded this point was there any real joy between
her and her husband. As soon as it was yielded, his happiness began to
grow and increase, like a plant in spring-time.

"Now you are mine again! Now we will be happy! Life and the world are
before us!" he exclaimed.

"But wher