m
the harshness which such a step inevitably involved. And by love he had
never sought to prevail. Her mental weakness seemed to have made
tenderness from him an impossibility. He could not bear with her. It was
as though he resented in her the likeness to one beloved whom he mourned
as dead.

Possibly he had never wholly forgiven her marriage--that disastrous
marriage that had broken her life. Possibly her clouded brain was to him
a source of suffering which drove him to hardness. He had ever been
impatient of weakness, and what he deemed hysteria was wholly beyond his
endurance; and the spectacle of the one being who had been so much to him
crushed beneath a sorrow the very existence of which he resented was one
which he had never been able to contemplate with either pity or
tolerance. As he had said, he would rather see her suffering than a
passive slave to that sorrow and all that it entailed.

So during the dreadful hours that followed he held her to her inferno,
convinced beyond all persuasion---with the stubborn conviction of an iron
will--that by so doing he was acting for her welfare, even in a sense
working out her salvation.

He relied upon the force of his personality to accomplish the end he had
in view. If he could break the fatal rule of things for one night only,
he believed that he would have achieved the hardest part. But the process
was long and agonizing. Only by the sternest effort of will could he keep
up the pressure which he knew he must not relax for a single moment if he
meant to attain the victory he desired.

There came a time when Isabel's powers of endurance were lost in the
abyss of mental suffering into which she was flung, and she struggled
like a mad creature for freedom. He held her in his arms, feeling her
strength wane with every paroxysm, till at last she lay exhausted, only
feebly entreating him for the respite he would not grant.

But even when the bitter conflict was over, when she was utterly
conquered at last, and he laid her down, too weak for further effort, he
did not gather the fruits of victory. For her eyes remained wide and
glassy, dry and sleepless with the fever that throbbed ceaselessly in the
poor tortured brain behind.

She was passive from exhaustion only, and though he closed the staring
eyes, yet they opened again with tense wakefulness the moment he took his
hand from the burning brow.

The night was far advanced when Biddy, creeping softly came to her