ssible
for him to inspire a feeling of love in a mind so pure in its
impulses, and so acute in its perceptions. If Mrs. Dexter had been a
worldly-minded woman--a lover of--or one moved by the small
ambitions of fashionable life--her husband would have been all well
enough. She would have been adjoined to him in a way altogether
satisfactory to her tastes, and they would have circled their orbit
of life without an eccentric motion. But the deeper capacities and
higher needs of Mrs. Dexter, made this union quite another thing.
Her husband had no power to fill her soul--to quicken her
life-pulses--to stir the silent chords of her heart with the deep,
pure, ravishing melodies they were made to give forth. That she was
superior to him mentally, Mr. Dexter was not long in discovering.
Very rapidly did her mind, quickened by a never-dying pain, spring
forward towards its culmination. Of its rapid growth in power and
acuteness, he only had evidence when he listened to her in
conversation with men and women of large acquirements and polished
tastes. Alone with him, her mind seemed to grow duller every day;
and if he applied the spur, it was only to produce a start, not a
movement onwards.

Alas for Leon Dexter! He had caged his beautiful bird; but her song
had lost, already, its ravishing sweetness.

CHAPTER XII.

THE first year of trial passed. If the young wife's heart-history
for that single year could be written, it would make a volume, every
pages of which the reader would find spotted with his tears. No
pen but that of the sufferer could write that history; and to her,
no second life, even in memory, were endurable. The record is sealed
up--and the story will not be told.

It is not within the range of all minds to comprehend what was
endured. Wealth, position, beauty, admiration, enlarged
intelligence, and highly cultivated tastes, were hers. She was the
wife of a man who almost worshipped her, and who ceased not to woo
her with all the arts he knew how to practise. Impatient he became,
at times, with her impassiveness, and fretted by her coldness.
Jealous of her he was always. But he strove to win that love which,
ere his half-coercion of her into marriage, he had been warned he
did not possess--but his strivings were in vain. He was a meaner
bird, and could not mate with the eagle.

To Mrs. Dexter, this life was a breathing death. Yet with a
wonderful power of endurance and self-control, she moved along