ments made and carried out in a tumult
of excitement, a sense of impending tragedy, accepted, and almost
welcomed, as the end of long weeks of doubt and self-torment, which
had become at last unbearable--into this fatal coil of actions and
impressions, the young wife had been sinking deeper and deeper with
each successive hour. She had neither friend nor adviser. Her father,
a weak inarticulate man, was dying; her stepmother hated her; and
she had long ceased to write to Miss Anna, because it was she who had
urged John to go to London! All sane inference and normal reasoning
were now indeed, and had been for some time, impossible to her.
Fenwick, possessed by the imaginations of his art, had had no
imagination--alack!--to spend upon his wife's case, and those morbid
processes of brain developed in her by solitude, and wounded love,
and mortified vanity. One hour with him!--one hour of love, scolding,
tears--would have saved them both. Alone, she was incapable of the
merest common sense. She came prepared to discover the worst--to find
evidence for all her fears. And for the worst she had elaborately laid
her plans. Only if it should turn out that she had been an unkind,
unreasonable wife, wrongly suspicious of her husband, was she
uncertain what she would do.

With dry, reddened eyes, she stared at the portrait of the woman
who must have stolen John from her. The mere arrangement of the room
seemed to her excited nerves a second outrage;--Mrs. Gibbs's reception
of her and all that it had implied, had been the first. What could
this strange illumination mean but that John's thoughts were taken
up with his sitter in an unusual and unlawful way? For weeks he could
leave his wife without a letter, a word of affection. But before going
out for an hour, he must needs light these lamps and place them so--in
order that this finicking lady should not feel herself deserted, that
he should still seem to be admiring and adoring her!

And after all, was she so pretty? Phoebe looked at the pale and subtle
face, at the hair and eyes so much less brilliant than her own, at the
thin figure, and the repose of the hands. Not pretty at all!--she said
to herself, violently--but selfish, and artful, and full, of course,
of all the tricks and wiles of 'society people.' _Didn't_ she know
that John was married? Phoebe scornfully refused to believe it. Such
women simply didn't care what stood in their way. If they took a
fancy to a man, what d