sty! He tried to persuade himself that her opinion about his
honesty was nothing to him;--but he failed. Her opinion was very much
to him. Though in his anger he had determined to throw her off from
him, he knew her to be one whose good opinion was worth having.

Not a word of overt accusation had been made against his wife. Every
allusion to her was full of love. But yet how heavy a charge was
really made! That such a secret should be kept from him, the father,
was acknowledged to be a heinous fault;--but the wife had known the
secret and had kept it from him, the father! And then how wretched a
thing it was for him that any one should dare to write to him about
the wife that had been taken away from him! In spite of all her
faults her name was so holy to him that it had never once passed
his lips since her death, except in low whispers to himself,--low
whispers made in the perfect, double-guarded seclusion of his own
chamber. "Cora, Cora," he had murmured, so that the sense of the
sound and not the sound itself had come to him from his own lips. And
now this woman wrote to him about her freely, as though there were
nothing sacred, no religion in the memory of her.

"It was not for me to raise any question as to Mr. Tregear's
fitness." Was it not palpable to all the world that he was unfit?
Unfit! How could a man be more unfit? He was asking for the hand of
one who was second only to royalty--who was possessed of everything,
who was beautiful, well-born, rich, who was the daughter of the Duke
of Omnium, and he had absolutely nothing of his own to offer.

But it was necessary that he should at last come to the consideration
of the actual point as to which she had written to him so forcibly.
He tried to set himself to the task in perfect honesty. He certainly
had condemned her. He had condemned her and had no doubt punished her
to the extent of his power. And if he could be brought to see that he
had done this unjustly, then certainly must he beg her pardon. And
when he considered it all, he had to own that her intimacy with his
uncle and his wife had not been so much of her seeking as of theirs.
It grieved him now that it should have been so, but so it was. And
after all this,--after the affectionate surrender of herself to his
wife's caprices which the woman had made,--he had turned upon her and
driven her away with ignominy. That was all true. As he thought of
it he became hot, and was conscious of a quivering feeli