is wife.
That cannot be imputed as sin to her,--not that,--because she did it not
knowing. She, poor innocent, was betrayed. But now that she knows it,
every mouthful that she eats of his bread is a sin.'

'It is the old man's bread,' said this older man, weakly.

'What matter? It is the bread of adultery.' It may certainly be said
that at this time Mrs. Bolton herself would have been relieved from none
of her sufferings by any new evidence which would have shown that
Crinkett and the others had sworn falsely. Though she loved her daughter
dearly, though her daughter's misery made her miserable, yet she did not
wish to restore the husband to the wife. Any allusion to a possibility
that the verdict had been a mistaken verdict was distasteful to her. Her
own original opinion respecting Caldigate had been made good by the
verdict. The verdict had proved her to be right, and her husband with
all his sons to have been wrong. The triumph had been very dark to her;
but still it had been a triumph. It was to her an established fact that
John Caldigate was not her daughter's husband and therefore she was
anxious, not to rehabilitate her daughter's position, but to receive her
own miserable child once more beneath the shelter of her own wing. That
they two might pray together, struggle together, together wear their
sackcloth and ashes, and together console themselves with their hopes of
eternal joys, while they shuddered, not altogether uncomfortably, at
the torments prepared for others,--this was now the only outlook in
which she could find a gleam of satisfaction; and she was so assured of
the reasonableness of her wishes, so convinced that the house of her
parents was now the only house in which Hester could live without
running counter to the precepts of her own religion, and counter also to
the rules of the wicked outside world, that she could not bring herself
to believe but that she would succeed at last. Merely to ask her child
to come, to repeat the invitation, and then to take a refusal, was by no
means sufficient for her energy. She had failed grievously when she had
endeavoured to make her daughter a prisoner at the Grange. After such an
attempt as that, it could hardly be thought that ordinary invitations
would be efficacious. But when that attempt had been made, it was
possible that Hester should justify herself by the law. According to law
she had then been Caldigate's wife. There had been some ground for her
to s