, he had drained the bitter cup to the dregs.
When he looked back, he saw nothing but the life that he had wasted.
When his thoughts turned to the future, they confronted a prospect empty
of all promise to a man still in the prime of life. Wife and child
were as completely lost to him as if they had been dead--and it was the
wife's doing. Had he any right to complain? Not the shadow of a right.
As the newspapers said, he had deserved it.

The clock roused him, striking the hour.

He rose hurriedly, and advanced toward the window. As he crossed the
room, he passed by a mirror. His own sullen despair looked at him in the
reflection of his face. "She will be back directly," he remembered; "she
mustn't see me like this!" He went on to the window to divert his mind
(and so to clear his face) by watching the stream of life flowing by
in the busy street. Artificial cheerfulness, assumed love in Sydney's
presence--that was what his life had come to already.

If he had known that she had gone out, seeking a temporary separation,
with _his_ fear of self-betrayal--if he had suspected that she, too, had
thoughts which must be concealed: sad forebodings of losing her hold on
his heart, terrifying suspicions that he was already comparing her, to
her own disadvantage, with the wife whom he had deserted--if he had made
these discoveries, what would the end have been? But she had, thus far,
escaped the danger of exciting his distrust. That she loved him, he
knew. That she had begun to doubt his attachment to her he would
not have believed, if his oldest friend had declared it on the best
evidence. She had said to him, that morning, at breakfast: "There was
a good woman who used to let lodgings here in London, and who was very
kind to me when I was a child;" and she had asked leave to go to the
house, and inquire if that friendly landlady was still living--with
nothing visibly constrained in her smile, and with no faltering tone in
her voice. It was not until she was out in the street that the tell-tale
tears came into her eyes, and the bitter sigh broke from her, and
mingled its little unheard misery with the grand rise and fall of the
tumult of London life. While he was still at the window, he saw her
crossing the street on her way back to him. She came into the room with
her complexion heightened by exercise; she kissed him, and said with her
pretty smile: "Have you been lonely without me?" Who would have supposed
that the torment o