ndition she could take no steps whatever in regard to the money.
That must be left to his conscience, to time, and to chance. As to
the threat of publicity, the probability, he thought, was that it
would lead to nothing. He doubted whether any respectable newspaper
would insert such a statement as that suggested. Were it published,
the evil must be borne. No diligence on her part, or on the part of
her lawyers, could prevent it.

But what had she meant when she wrote of continual sin, sin not to be
avoided, of sin repeated daily which nevertheless weighed her to the
ground? Was it expected of him that he should answer that portion of
her letter? It amounted to a passionate renewal of that declaration
of affection for himself which she had made at Koenigstein, and which
had pervaded her whole life since some period antecedent to her
wretched marriage. Phineas, as he thought of it, tried to analyse the
nature of such a love. He also, in those old days, had loved her, and
had at once resolved that he must tell her so, though his hopes of
success had been poor indeed. He had taken the first opportunity, and
had declared his purpose. She, with the imperturbable serenity of a
matured kind-hearted woman, had patted him on the back, as it were,
as she told him of her existing engagement with Mr. Kennedy. Could it
be that at that moment she could have loved him as she now said she
did, and that she should have been so cold, so calm, and so kind;
while, at that very moment, this coldness, calmness, and kindness was
but a thin crust over so strong a passion? How different had been
his own love! He had been neither calm nor kind. He had felt himself
for a day or two to be so terribly knocked about that the world was
nothing to him. For a month or two he had regarded himself as a man
peculiarly circumstanced,--marked for misfortune and for a solitary
life. Then he had retricked his beams, and before twelve months were
passed had almost forgotten his love. He knew now, or thought that
he knew,--that the continued indulgence of a hopeless passion was a
folly opposed to the very instincts of man and woman,--a weakness
showing want of fibre and of muscle in the character. But here was
a woman who could calmly conceal her passion in its early days and
marry a man whom she did not love in spite of it, who could make her
heart, her feelings, and all her feminine delicacy subordinate to
material considerations, and nevertheless could not ri