and
ruined her husband's peace. She knew poor Paul would never be himself
again! She had carried the snake so long harmless in her bosom only to
let it at last creep from her lips into her husband's ear, sting the
vital core of her universe, and blast it forever! How foolish she had
been!--What was left her to do? What would her husband have her to do?
Oh misery! he cared no more what she did or did not do. She was
alone--utterly alone! But she need not live.

Dimly, vaguely, the vapor of such thoughts as these passed through her
despairing soul, as she lifted herself from the floor and tottered back
to her room. Yet even then, in the very midst of her freezing misery,
there was, although she had not yet begun to recognize it, a nascent
comfort in that she had spoken and confessed. She would not really have
taken back her confession. And although the torture was greater, yet was
it more endurable than that she had been suffering before. She had told
him who had a right to know.--But, alas! what a deception was that dream
of the trumpet and the voice! A poor trick to entrap a helpless sinner!

Slowly, with benumbed fingers and trembling hands, she dressed herself:
that bed she would lie in no more, for she had wronged her husband.
Whether before or after he was her husband, mattered nothing. To have
ever called him husband was the wrong. She had seemed that she was not,
else he would never have loved or sought her; she had outraged his
dignity, defiled him; he had cast her off, and she could not, would not
blame him. Happily for her endurance of her misery, she did not turn
upon her idol and cast him from his pedestal; she did not fix her gaze
upon his failure instead of her own; she did not espy the contemptible
in his conduct, and revolt from her allegiance.

But was such a man then altogether the ideal of a woman's soul? Was he a
fit champion of humanity who would aid only within the limits of his
pride? who, when a despairing creature cried in soul-agony for help,
thought first and only of his own honor? The notion men call their honor
is the shadow of righteousness, the shape that is where the light is
not, the devil that dresses as nearly in angel-fashion as he can, but is
none the less for that a sneak and a coward.

She put on her cloak and bonnet: the house was his, not hers. He and she
had never been one: she must go and meet her fate. There was one power,
at least, the key to the great door of liberty, whi