n the feeling had passed; and the tenderness, born of so
piteous a sight, returned no more. Her own dullness afterward
deprived him even of the chance of finding her an agreeable
companion. He saw that she was deeply melancholy. Yet what could he
do? Even if he had wished it he could not have forced himself to love
this woman, notwithstanding her devotion to himself. And this he did
not even wish. Not all his sense of honor, not all his emotions of
gratitude, not all his instincts of generosity, not even the
remembrance of his solemn promise to General Pomeroy, could excite
within him any desire that his heart might change from its affection
and its longing for another, to yield that love to her.

True, once or twice his heart had smote him as he thought of his
utter coldness and want of gratitude toward this woman who had done
so much for him. This feeling was very painful on that day of the
accident. Yet it passed. He could not force himself to muse over his
own shortcomings. He could not bring himself to wish that he should
be one whit more grateful to her or more tender. Any thought of her
being ever more to him than she was now seemed repugnant. Any wish
for it was out of the question. Indeed, he never thought of it as
being within the bounds of possibility. For behind all these late
events there lay certain things which made it impossible for him,
under ordinary circumstances, ever to become fully reconciled to her.

For, after all, in his cooler moods he now felt how she was
associated with the bitterest memories of his life. She it was who
had been the cause, unwilling no doubt as he now thought, but still
no less the cause of the blight that had descended upon his life. As
that life had passed he could not help cursing the day when first
General Pomeroy proposed that unholy agreement. It was this that had
exiled him from his native land and would keep him an exile forever.
It was this which denied to him the joys of virtuous love, when his
heart had been filled with one image--an image which now was never
absent. Bound by the law to this woman, who was named his wife, he
could never hope in any way to gain that other one on whom all his
heart was fixed. Between him and those hopes that made life precious
she stood and rendered those hopes impossible.

Then, too, he could not avoid recalling his life in India, which she
had tried to make, as far as in her lay, one long misery, by those
malevolent letters whic