stood
that she was expected to be the cloak and the accomplice of this infamy.

Many women would have been utterly crushed by such a disclosure; some
would have fled from him immediately, and exposed and denounced the
crime. Lady Byron did neither. When all the hope of womanhood died out
of her heart, there arose within her, stronger, purer, and brighter, that
immortal kind of love such as God feels for the sinner,--the love of
which Jesus spoke, and which holds the one wanderer of more account than
the ninety and nine that went not astray. She would neither leave her
husband nor betray him, nor yet would she for one moment justify his sin;
and hence came two years of convulsive struggle, in which sometimes, for
a while, the good angel seemed to gain ground, and then the evil one
returned with sevenfold vehemence.

Lord Byron argued his case with himself and with her with all the
sophistries of his powerful mind. He repudiated Christianity as
authority; asserted the right of every human being to follow out what he
called 'the impulses of nature.' Subsequently he introduced into one of
his dramas the reasoning by which he justified himself in incest.

In the drama of 'Cain,' Adah, the sister and the wife of Cain, thus
addresses him:--

'Cain, walk not with this spirit.
Bear with what we have borne, and love me: I
Love thee.

Lucifer. More than thy mother and thy sire?

Adah. I do. Is that a sin, too?

Lucifer. No, not yet:
It one day will be in your children.

Adah. What!
Must not my daughter love her brother Enoch?

Lucifer. Not as thou lovest Cain.

Adah. O my God!
Shall they not love, and bring forth things that love
Out of their love? Have they not drawn their milk
Out of this bosom? Was not he, their father,
Born of the same sole womb, in the same hour
With me? Did we not love each other, and,
In multiplying our being, multiply
Things which will love each other as we love
Them? And as I love thee, my Cain, go not
Forth with this spirit: he is not of ours.

Lucifer. The sin I speak of is not of my making
And cannot be a sin in you, whate'er
It seems in those who will replace ye in
Mortality.

Adah. What is the sin which is not
Sin in itself? Can circumstance make sin
Of virtue? If it doth, we are the slaves
Of'--

Lad