een
rough to her before, and she could not at all understand why he had
been so rough to her now. Surely it was impossible that he should
be jealous because her old lover had written to her such a letter
as that which she had shown him! And then she was almost stunned by
the opinions he had expressed about Fletcher, opinions which she
knew,--was sure that she knew,--to be absolutely erroneous. A liar!
Oh, heavens! And then the letter itself was so ingenuous and so
honest! Anxious as she was to do all that her husband bade her, she
could not be guided by him in this matter. And then she remembered
his words: "You must allow me to dictate to you what you ought to
think." Could it be that marriage meant as much as that,--that a
husband was to claim to dictate to his wife what opinions she was
to form about this and that person,--about a person she had known
so well, whom he had never known? Surely she could only think in
accordance with her own experience and her own intelligence! She was
certain that Arthur Fletcher was no liar. Not even her own husband
could make her think that.

CHAPTER XXXI

"Yes;--with a Horsewhip in My Hand"

Emily Lopez, when she crept out of her own room and joined her
husband just before dinner, was hardly able to speak to him, so
thoroughly was she dismayed, and troubled, and horrified, by the
manner in which he had taken Arthur Fletcher's letter. While she had
been alone she had thought it all over, anxious if possible to bring
herself into sympathy with her husband; but the more she thought
of it the more evident did it become to her that he was altogether
wrong. He was so wrong that it seemed to her that she would be a
hypocrite if she pretended to agree with him. There were half-a-dozen
accusations conveyed against Mr. Fletcher by her husband's view
of the matter. He was a liar, giving a false account of his
candidature;--and he was a coward; and an enemy to her, who had laid
a plot by which he had hoped to make her act fraudulently towards her
own husband, who had endeavoured to creep into a correspondence with
her, and so to compromise her! All this, which her husband's mind had
so easily conceived, was not only impossible to her, but so horrible
that she could not refrain from disgust at her husband's conception.
The letter had been left with him, but she remembered every word of
it. She was sure that it was an honest letter, meaning no more than
had been said,--simply intendi