she should be forced to absent
herself at this moment, when the excitement of the battle was about
to begin in earnest? Her footsteps lingered as she slowly retreated
from the drawing-room door, and for one instant she absolutely
paused, standing still with eager ears. It was but for an instant,
and then she went on up stairs, out of hearing, and sitting herself
down by her bedside allowed the battle to rage in her imagination.

Mr. Furnival would have sat there silent till his wife had gone also,
and so the matter would have terminated for that evening,--had she
so willed it. But she had been thinking of her miseries; and, having
come to some sort of resolution to speak of them openly, what time
could she find more appropriate for doing so than the present? "Tom,"
she said,--and as she spoke there was still a twinkle of the old
love in her eye, "we are not going on together as well as we should
do,--not lately. Would it not be well to make a change before it is
too late?"

"What change?" he asked; not exactly in an ill humour, but with a
husky, thick voice. He would have preferred now that she should have
followed her friend to bed.

"I do not want to dictate to you, Tom, but--! Oh Tom, if you knew how
wretched I am!"

"What makes you wretched?"

"Because you leave me all alone; because you care more for other
people than you do for me; because you never like to be at home,
never if you can possibly help it. You know you don't. You are always
away now upon some excuse or other; you know you are. I don't have
you home to dinner not one day in the week through the year. That
can't be right, and you know it is not. Oh Tom! you are breaking my
heart, and deceiving me,--you are. Why did I go down and find that
woman in your chamber with you, when you were ashamed to own to me
that she was coming to see you? If it had been in the proper way of
law business, you wouldn't have been ashamed. Oh, Tom!"

The poor woman had begun her plaint in a manner that was not
altogether devoid of a discreet eloquence. If only she could have
maintained that tone, if she could have confined her words to the
tale of her own grievances, and have been contented to declare that
she was unhappy, only because he was not with her, it might have
been well. She might have touched his heart, or at any rate his
conscience, and there might have been some enduring result for good.
But her feelings had been too many for her, and as her wrongs came