ntrast between the crude
gawkiness of the raw girl he has drifted into marrying--for I suppose it
was more accident than any thing else--with the mature and subtile
grace, the fine and low-voiced sweetness of the woman whom his whole
heart and soul and taste chose and approved, must have struck him with
keen force. I expected _that_: it would not have taken me by surprise.
If he had emerged from among the laurestines, depressed, and vainly
struggling for a factitious cheerfulness, I think I could have
understood it. I think I could have borne with it, could have tried
meekly to steal back into his heart again, to win him back, in despite
of ignorance, gawkiness, and all other my drawbacks, by force of sheer
love.

But the change was surely too abrupt to be accounted for on this
hypothesis. Would _Roger_, my pattern of courtesy--Roger, who shrinks
from hurting the meanest beggar's feelings--would he, in such plain
terms, have deplored and wished undone our marriage, if it were only
suffering to _himself_ that it had entailed? Has his unselfish chivalry
gone the way of Algy's brotherly love? Impossible! the more I think of
it, the more unlikely it seems--the more certain it appears to me that I
must look elsewhere for the cause of the alteration that has so heavily
darkened my day.

I have risen, and am walking quickly up and down. I have shaken off my
stolid apathy, or, rather, it has fallen off of itself. Can she have
told him any ill tales of me? any thing to my disadvantage? Instantly
the thought of Musgrave--the black and heavy thought that is never far
from the portals of my mind--darts across me, and, at the same instant,
like a flash of lightning, the recollection of my meeting her on the
fatal evening, just as (with tear-stained, swollen face) I had parted
from Frank--of the alert and lively interest in her eyes, as she bowed
and smiled to me, flames with sudden illumination into my soul. Still I
can hardly credit it. It would, no doubt, be pleasant to her to sow
dissension between us, but would even _she_ dare to carry ill tales of a
wife to a husband? And even supposing that she had, would he attach so
much importance to my being seen with wet cheeks? I, who cry so
easily--I, who wept myself nearly blind when Jacky caught his leg in the
snare? If he thinks so much of that part of the tale, _what would he
think of the rest_?

As I make this reflection I shudder, and again congratulate myself on my
silence. F