that should
assist him in his meanness! And then, Harry, his last illness! Oh,
Harry, you would pity me if you could know all!"

"It was his own intemperance!"

"Intemperance! It was brandy--sheer brandy. He brought himself to such a
state that nothing but brandy would keep him alive, and in which brandy
was sure to kill him--and it did kill him. Did you ever hear of the
horrors of drink?"

"Yes; I have heard of such a state."

"I hope you may never live to see it. It is a sight that would stick by
you for ever. But I saw it, and tended him through the whole, as though
I had been his servant. I remained with him when that man who opened the
door for you could no longer endure the room. I was with him when the
strong woman from the hospital, though she could not understand his
words, almost fainted at what she saw and heard. He was punished, Harry.
I need wish no farther vengeance on him, even for all his cruelty, his
injustice, his unmanly treachery. Is it not fearful to think that any
man should have the power of bringing himself to such an end as that?"

Harry was thinking rather how fearful it was that a man should have it
in his power to drag any woman through such a Gehenna as that which this
lord had created. He felt that had Julia Brabazon been his, as she had
once promised him, he never would have allowed himself to speak a harsh
word to her, to have looked at her except with loving eyes. But she had
chosen to join herself to a man who had treated her with a cruelty
exceeding all that his imagination could have conceived. "It is a mercy
that he has gone," said he at last.

"It is a mercy for both. Perhaps you can understand now something of my
married life. And through it all I had but one friend--if I may call him
a friend who had come to terms with my husband, and who was to have been
his agent in destroying me. But when this man understood from me that I
was not what he had been taught to think me--which my husband told him I
was--he relented."

"May I ask what was that man's name?"

"His name is Pateroff. He is a Pole, but he speaks English like an
Englishman. In my presence he told Lord Ongar that he was false and
brutal. Lord Ongar laughed, with that little, low, sneering laughter
which was his nearest approach to merriment, and told Count Pateroff
that that was of course his game before me. There, Harry, I will tell
you nothing more of it. You will understand enough to know what I have
suffered;