roxysm of her anger and her
distress she had thought such qualities enough for her daughter's
happiness.

The first days of this marriage were apparently happy; or, to express
one of those latent facts, the miseries of which are buried by women
in the depths of their souls, Juana would not cast down her husband's
joy,--a double role, dreadful to play, but to which, sooner or later,
all women unhappily married come. This is a history impossible to
recount in its full truth. Juana, struggling hourly against her nature,
a nature both Spanish and Italian, having dried up the source of her
tears by dint of weeping, was a human type, destined to represent
woman's misery in its utmost expression, namely, sorrow undyingly
active; the description of which would need such minute observations
that to persons eager for dramatic emotions they would seem insipid.
This analysis, in which every wife would find some one of her own
sufferings, would require a volume to express them all; a fruitless,
hopeless volume by its very nature, the merit of which would consist in
faintest tints and delicate shadings which critics would declare to be
effeminate and diffuse. Besides, what man could rightly approach,
unless he bore another heart within his heart, those solemn and touching
elegies which certain women carry with them to their tomb; melancholies,
misunderstood even by those who cause them; sighs unheeded, devotions
unrewarded,--on earth at least,--splendid silences misconstrued;
vengeances withheld, disdained; generosities perpetually bestowed and
wasted; pleasures longed for and denied; angelic charities secretly
accomplished,--in short, all the religions of womanhood and its
inextinguishable love.

Juana knew that life; fate spared her nought. She was wholly a wife,
but a sorrowful and suffering wife; a wife incessantly wounded, yet
forgiving always; a wife pure as a flawless diamond,--she who had the
beauty and the glow of the diamond, and in that beauty, that glow, a
vengeance in her hand; for she was certainly not a woman to fear the
dagger added to her "dot."

At first, inspired by a real love, by one of those passions which for
the time being change even odious characters and bring to light all that
may be noble in a soul, Diard behaved like a man of honor. He forced
Montefiore to leave the regiment and even the army corps, so that his
wife might never meet him during the time they remained in Spain.
Next, he petitioned for h