took on, through mere habit of enactment, a certain quality of
reality. A servile mood of attachment to the Earl became distinctly
visible in her contemporaneously with an actual dislike for her late
husband's memory. The mood of attachment grew and continued when the
statue was removed. A permanent revulsion was operant in her, which
intensified as time wore on. How fright could have effected such a
change of idiosyncrasy learned physicians alone can say; but I believe
such cases of reactionary instinct are not unknown.

The upshot was that the cure became so permanent as to be itself a new
disease. She clung to him so tightly, that she would not willingly be
out of his sight for a moment. She would have no sitting-room apart from
his, though she could not help starting when he entered suddenly to her.
Her eyes were well-nigh always fixed upon him. If he drove out, she
wished to go with him; his slightest civilities to other women made her
frantically jealous; till at length her very fidelity became a burden to
him, absorbing his time, and curtailing his liberty, and causing him to
curse and swear. If he ever spoke sharply to her now, she did not
revenge herself by flying off to a mental world of her own; all that
affection for another, which had provided her with a resource, was now a
cold black cinder.

From that time the life of this scared and enervated lady--whose
existence might have been developed to so much higher purpose but for the
ignoble ambition of her parents and the conventions of the time--was one
of obsequious amativeness towards a perverse and cruel man. Little
personal events came to her in quick succession--half a dozen, eight,
nine, ten such events,--in brief; she bore him no less than eleven
children in the eight following years, but half of them came prematurely
into the world, or died a few days old; only one, a girl, attained to
maturity; she in after years became the wife of the Honourable Mr.
Beltonleigh, who was created Lord D'Almaine, as may be remembered.

There was no living son and heir. At length, completely worn out in mind
and body, Lady Uplandtowers was taken abroad by her husband, to try the
effect of a more genial climate upon her wasted frame. But nothing
availed to strengthen her, and she died at Florence, a few months after
her arrival in Italy.

Contrary to expectation, the Earl of Uplandtowers did not marry again.
Such affection as existed in him--strange, hard,