uspicious, so far.
I decline giving you any answer until I know more than I know now. Did
you think it necessary to inform this man's wife of what had passed
between you, and to ask her for an explanation?"

"Of course I thought it necessary!" said the doctor, indignant at the
reflection on his humanity which the question seemed to imply. "If ever
I saw a woman fond of her husband, and sorry for her husband, it is this
unhappy Mrs. Armadale. As soon as we were left alone together, I sat
down by her side, and I took her hand in mine. Why not? I am an ugly old
man, and I may allow myself such liberties as these!"

"Excuse me," said the impenetrable Scotchman. "I beg to suggest that you
are losing the thread of the narrative."

"Nothing more likely," returned the doctor, recovering his good humor.
"It is in the habit of my nation to be perpetually losing the thread;
and it is evidently in the habit of yours, sir, to be perpetually
finding it. What an example here of the order of the universe, and the
everlasting fitness of things!"

"Will you oblige me, once for all, by confining yourself to the facts,"
persisted Mr. Neal, frowning impatiently. "May I inquire, for my own
information, whether Mrs. Armadale could tell you what it is her husband
wishes me to write, and why it is that he refuses to let her write for
him?"

"There is my thread found--and thank you for finding it!" said the
doctor. "You shall hear what Mrs. Armadale had to tell me, in
Mrs. Armadale's own words. 'The cause that now shuts me out of his
confidence,' she said, 'is, I firmly believe, the same cause that has
always shut me out of his heart. I am the wife he has wedded, but I am
not the woman he loves. I knew when he married me that another man had
won from him the woman he loved. I thought I could make him forget her.
I hoped when I married him; I hoped again when I bore him a son. Need
I tell you the end of my hopes--you have seen it for yourself.' (Wait,
sir, I entreat you! I have not lost the thread again; I am following it
inch by inch.) 'Is this all you know?' I asked. 'All I knew,' she said,
'till a short time since. It was when we were in Switzerland, and when
his illness was nearly at its worst, that news came to him by accident
of that other woman who has been the shadow and the poison of my
life--news that she (like me) had borne her husband a son. On the
instant of his making that discovery--a trifling discovery, if ever
there was one