hat question came often into her mind. She well might,
for one of the great hopes with which she had married was quite gone by
now. There was no longer any possibility of maintaining that the faults
were of manner only, no longer any reasonable expectation that she would
be able to banish or materially to diminish them. It was for better for
worse with a vengeance then. But did she repent? There were times when
she wept, times when she shuddered, times when she scorned, even times
when she hated. But had she ever so felt as to be confident that if
Omnipotence had offered to undo the past, she would have had the past
undone? There had perhaps been one such occasion quite early in the
marriage, and the woe of it had been terrible; but it was followed almost
immediately by a "moment," by an inspired outbreak of his over some case
in the paper, by a vow to see an injustice remedied, a ceaseless,
unsparing, unpaid month's work to that end, a triumph over wrong and
prejudice in the cause of a helpless woman. He had nearly killed himself
over it, the doctor said, and May had watched by his bed, without tears,
but with a conviction that if he died she must die also; because it
seemed as though he had faced death rather than her condemnation. That
was not the truth of it, of course, but she and he between them had made
it seem the truth to her.

And now, with all the meanness of this abandonment of his friends, with
all this fawning on the moneyed Wesleyans before her eyes, she could not
declare that she repented, lest he, waking again to greatness, should
plunge her again into the depths of abasement. But that the same man
should be great and mean, and should escape arraignment for his meanness
by making play with his headache! She smiled now to remember how great
the mere faults of manner had once seemed to her girlish fastidiousness;
they were small to her now; her teeth were set on edge indeed, but by a
sharper sourness than lay in them. To the faults of manner she had grown
to some extent accustomed; she had become an adept in covering and
excusing them. To-day, in her interview with Dick Benyon, she had turned
alike art on to the other faults. A new thought and a new apprehension
came into her mind.

"If I go on defending him," she murmured, "shall I end by getting like
him and really think it all right? I wonder!" For it was difficult not to
identify herself with her cause, and he was now her cause. Who asks a
lawyer to