urn in the evening to the pretty villa where he had
once been so happy. In the warmth of his anger, he felt that he never
could look again upon his wife. To his sensitive, refined nature there
was something more repulsive in the dishonorable act she had committed
than there would have been in a crime of deeper dye. He was shocked
and startled--more so than if he awoke some fair summer morning to find
Dora dead by his side. She was indeed dead to him in one sense. The
ideal girl, all purity, gentleness, and truth, whom he had loved and
married, had, it appeared, never really existed after all. He shrank
from the idea of the angry, vehement words and foul calumnies. He
shrank from the woman who had forgotten every rule of good breeding,
every trace of good manners, in angry, fierce passion.

How was he ever to face Miss Charteris again? She would never mention
one word of what had happened, but he could ill brook the shame Dora
had brought upon him. He remembered the summer morning in the woods
when he told Valentine the story of his love, and had pictured his
pretty, artless Dora to her. Could the angry woman who had dared to
insult him, and to calumniate the fairest and truest lady in all
England, possibly be the same?

Ronald had never before been brought into close contact with dishonor.
He had some faint recollection at college of having seen and known a
young man, the son of a wealthy nobleman, scorned and despised, driven
from all society, and he was told that it was because he had been
detected in the act of listening at the principal's door. He
remembered how old and young had shunned this young man as though he
were plague-stricken; and now his own wife Dora had done the very same
thing under circumstances that rendered the dishonor greater. He asked
himself, with a cynical smile, what he could expect? He had married
for love of a pretty, child-like face, never giving any thought to
principle, mind, or intellect. The only wonder was that so wretched
and unequal a match had not turned out ten times worse. His father's
warning rang in his ears. How blind, how foolish he had been!

Every hope of his own life was wrecked, every hope and plan of his
father's disappointed and dead. There seemed to him nothing left to
care for. His wife--oh, he would not think of her! The name vexed
him. He could not stand in Valentine's presence again, and for the
first time he realized what she had been to him.