s over the library fire he tried to lead the talk to books, with
a parenthesis, now and again, from the page beneath his eye; and Bessy
met the experiment with conciliatory eagerness. She showed, in especial,
a hopeful but misleading preference for poetry, leaning back with
dreaming lids and lovely parted lips while he rolled out the immortal
measures; but her outward signs of attention never ripened into any
expression of opinion, or any after-allusion to what she heard, and
before long he discovered that Justine Brent was his only listener. It
was to her that the words he read began to be unconsciously addressed;
her comments directed him in his choice of subjects, and the ensuing
discussions restored him to some semblance of mental activity.

Bessy, true to her new role of acquiescence, shone silently on this
interchange of ideas; Amherst even detected in her a vague admiration
for his power of conversing on subjects which she regarded as abstruse;
and this childlike approval, combined with her submission to his will,
deluded him with a sense of recovered power over her. He could not but
note that the new phase in their relations had coincided with his first
assertion of mastery; and he rashly concluded that, with the removal of
the influences tending to separate them, his wife might gradually be won
back to her earlier sympathy with his views.

To accept this theory was to apply it; for nothing could long divert
Amherst from his main purpose, and all the thwarted strength of his will
was only gathering to itself fresh stores of energy. He had never been a
skilful lover, for no woman had as yet stirred in him those feelings
which call the finer perceptions into play; and there was no instinct to
tell him that Bessy's sudden conformity to his wishes was as unreasoning
as her surrender to his first kiss. He fancied that he and she were at
length reaching some semblance of that moral harmony which should grow
out of the physical accord, and that, poor and incomplete as the
understanding was, it must lift and strengthen their relation.

He waited till early winter had brought solitude to Lynbrook, dispersing
the hunting colony to various points of the compass, and sending Mr.
Langhope to Egypt and the Riviera, while Mrs. Ansell, as usual, took up
her annual tour of a social circuit whose extreme points were marked by
Boston and Baltimore--and then he made his final appeal to his wife.

His pretext for speaking was a le