many prizes; but
divers penalties attach to its detection, on land as well as on sea.
Indeed, it involves the necessity of _somebody's_ appearing as a
convicted impostor. On the present occasion--as the actor for whom the
character was cast utterly declined to play it--the part fell to poor
Harry Molyneux, who certainly looked it to perfection. In all his little
difficulties and troubles, when hard pressed, he was wont to fall back
upon the reserve of _la mignonne_, sure of meeting there with sympathy,
if not with succor. He dared not do so now. He dared not encounter the
reproach of the beautiful, gentle eyes that had never looked into his
own otherwise than trustfully since they first told the secret that she
loved him dearly. The half-smothered cry that broke from Fanny's lips
when the chaplain made his disclosure went straight to the heart of her
treacherous husband. He felt as if he deserved that those pretty lips
should never smile upon him again.

Oh, all my readers!--masculine especially--whose patience has carried
you thus far, remark, I beseech you, the dangers that attend any
dereliction from the duty of matrimonial confidence. What right have we
to lock up the secrets of our most intimate friends, far less our own,
instead of pouring them into the bosom of the [Greek: _bathukolpos
akoitis_], which is capacious enough to hold them all, were they tenfold
more numerous and weighty? Such reticence is rife with awful peril. In
our folly and blindness, we fancy ourselves secure, while the ground is
mined under our guilty feet, and the explosion is even now preparing,
from which only our _disjecta membra_ will emerge. Of course, some
cold-hearted caviler will begin to quote instances of carefully-planned
and promising conspiracies, which miscarried solely because the details
reached a feminine ear. It may have been so; but I don't see what
business conspiracies have to succeed at all. Long live the
Constitution! Truly, such delightful confidences must be something
one-sided, for the mildest Griselda of them all would be led as a
"Martha to the Stakes" sooner than concede to her husband the
unrestricted supervision of her correspondence. I have indeed a dim
recollection of having heard of _one_ bride of seventeen, who, during
the honeymoon, was weak and (_selon les dames_) wicked enough to submit
to profane male eyes epistles received from the friends of her youth, in
their simple entirety, instead of reading out an