so she sat and listened, and looked cold and angry by
turns, as if his miseries were an impertinence and a wrong to her;
trying to take refuge against remorse in a great bravery of hate and
contempt!

He related the whole history to Forrester who had been in his confidence
about the marriage from the beginning. We had no suspicion of the
inordinate love, suppressed, chafed, galled, and tortured into madness,
he had borne to Astraea all through those years of malediction, during
which he had exhausted every form of threat and appeal to enforce his
rights. He had hoped on wildly to the last. He had watched the progress
of my attachment to her, and had encouraged it under a frantic delusion,
that the final detection of it would place her at his mercy. His mind
had been so wrought upon by this terrible passion, and the plots and
schemes he was forever weaving to win or ensnare her, that much of his
conduct which had appeared to me monstrous and absurd, became
susceptible of a sufficiently obvious solution.

He assigned as a reason for not having adopted legal means to compel the
fulfillment of the contract, his fear of driving Astraea to extremities.
He had always apprehended that the moment he adopted any step of that
kind, she would make her escape from him; and his policy was to keep on
terms with her, at all events, and by a system of small, perpetual
persecution, to subjugate her at last.

And now that she was gone, and that she had put the world between them,
what course did he intend to pursue? Implacable vengeance against
me--peace and pardon for her! This unintelligible being, whose person
was not more hideous than his mind, had yet in the depths of his nature
one drop of sweetness that redeemed and made him human. This love had
survived all hatreds and revenges; and now that hope was over, that its
object never could soothe his agonies or reward his devotion, that even
the sufferings he was undergoing on her account only rendered him more
repulsive in her eyes, nothing but tenderness and forgiveness toward her
remained, with the bitterest regrets and self-accusations for the wrongs
he had done her and the issues to which he had forced her. How such a
flower of noble and delicate feeling could have sprung up in such a soil
was, indeed, inexplicable. But it is wonderful how a great sorrow
purifies and strengthens the soul!

But for me? There was no clemency for me. The concentrated venom of his
nature was reser