time, I was just a male sick nurse. And what chance had I
against those three hardened gamblers, who were all in league to conceal
their hands from me? What earthly chance? They were three to one--and
they made me happy. Oh God, they made me so happy that I doubt if even
paradise, that shall smooth out all temporal wrongs, shall ever give me
the like. And what could they have done better, or what could they have
done that could have been worse? I don't know....

I suppose that, during all that time I was a deceived husband and that
Leonora was pimping for Edward. That was the cross that she had to take
up during her long Calvary of a life....

You ask how it feels to be a deceived husband. Just Heavens, I do not
know. It feels just nothing at all. It is not Hell, certainly it is not
necessarily Heaven. So I suppose it is the intermediate stage. What
do they call it? Limbo. No, I feel nothing at all about that. They are
dead; they have gone before their Judge who, I hope, will open to them
the springs of His compassion. It is not my business to think about
it. It is simply my business to say, as Leonora's people say: "Requiem
aeternam dona eis, Do mine, et lux perpetua luceat eis. In memoria
aeterna erit...." But what were they? The just? The unjust? God knows! I
think that the pair of them were only poor wretches, creeping over this
earth in the shadow of an eternal wrath. It is very terrible....

It is almost too terrible, the picture of that judgement, as it appears
to me sometimes, at nights. It is probably the suggestion of some
picture that I have seen somewhere. But upon an immense plain, suspended
in mid-air, I seem to see three figures, two of them clasped close in an
intense embrace, and one intolerably solitary. It is in black and white,
my picture of that judgement, an etching, perhaps; only I cannot tell an
etching from a photographic reproduction. And the immense plain is the
hand of God, stretching out for miles and miles, with great spaces above
it and below it. And they are in the sight of God, and it is Florence
that is alone.... And, do you know, at the thought of that intense
solitude I feel an overwhelming desire to rush forward and comfort her.
You cannot, you see, have acted as nurse to a person for twelve years
without wishing to go on nursing them, even though you hate them with
the hatred of the adder, and even in the palm of God. But, in the
nights, with that vision of judgement before me, I