she knew not what to do, tears
rushed into her eyes. My father, no less distressed, yet unwilling to
outrage the feelings of his friend by doing or saying what his
indignation prompted, turned an appealing look on P.

Never, as he often said, was the painful expression of that sight
effaced from his mind. It haunted his dreams and disturbed his waking
thoughts. P. sat with his head bent forward, and his eyes cast down,
pale, but calm, with a fixed expression, not merely of patient wo, but
of patient shame, which it would not have been thought possible for
that, noble countenance to wear, "yet," said my father, "it became him.
At other times he was handsome, but then beautiful, though of a beauty
saddened and abashed. For a spiritual light borrowed from the worldly
perfection of his mien that illustration by contrast, which the
penitence of the Magdalen does from the glowing earthliness of her
charms."

Seeing that he preserved silence, while Mrs. P. grew still more
exasperated, my father rose and led his wife to her own room. Half an
hour had passed, in painful and wondering surmises, when a gentle knock
was heard at the door, and P. entered equipped for a journey. "We are
just going," he said, and holding out his hand, but without looking at
them, "Forgive."

They each took his hand, and silently pressed it, then he went without a
word more.

Some time passed and they heard now and then of P., as he passed from
one army station to another, with his uncongenial companion, who became,
it was said, constantly more degraded. Whoever mentioned having seen
them, wondered at the chance which had yoked him to such a woman, but
yet more at the silent fortitude with which he bore it. Many blamed him
for enduring it, apparently without efforts to check her; others
answered that he had probably made such at an earlier period, and
finding them unavailing, had resigned himself to despair, and was too
delicate to meet the scandal that, with such a resistance as such a
woman could offer, must attend a formal separation.

But my father, who was not in such haste to come to conclusions, and
substitute some plausible explanation for the truth, found something in
the look of P. at that trying moment to which none of these explanations
offered a key. There was in it, he felt, a fortitude, but not the
fortitude of the hero, a religious submission, above the penitent, if
not enkindled with the enthusiasm of the martyr.

I have said t