as an excuse for
silence, and to conceal her passing emotions. Meanwhile the newspaper
crackled in her husband's hand as he moved its broad leaves.

Presently Mr. Ferrars started with an exclamation of grief and
astonishment that completely roused his absent wife.

"My dear Walter, what has happened?" she asked, with great anxiety.

"A man a bankrupt, whom I thought as safe as the Bank of England. Though
it is true people talked about him months ago--spoke suspiciously of his
personal extravagance, and, above all, said that his wife was ruining
him."

"His wife!"

"Yes;--but I cannot understand that sort of thing. A few hundreds a year
more or less could be of little moment to a man like Beaufort, and I
don't suppose she spent more than you do, my darling. At any rate she was
never better dressed. Yet I believe the truth was, that she got
frightfully into debt unknown to him; and debt is a sort of thing that
multiplies itself in a most astonishing manner, and sows by the wayside
the seeds of all sorts of misery. Then people say that when pay-day came
at last, bickerings ensued, their domestic happiness was broken up.
Beaufort grew reckless, and plunged into the excitement of the maddest
speculations."

"How dreadful!" murmured Lady Lucy.

"Dreadful, indeed! I don't know what I should do with such a wife."

"Would not you forgive her if you loved her very much?" asked Lady Lucy,
and she spoke in the singularly calm tone of suppressed emotion.

"Once, perhaps, once; and if her fault were the fault of youthful
inexperience,--but so much falseness, mean deception, and mental
deterioration must have accompanied such transactions, that--in short, I
thank Heaven that I have never been put to the trial."

As he spoke, the eyes of Mr. Farrars were fixed on the leading article of
the _Times_, not on his wife. Presently Lady Lucy glided from the room,
without her absence being at the moment observed. Once in her
dressing-room she turned the key, and sinking into a low chair, gave vent
to her grief in some of the bitterest tears she had ever shed. She, too,
was in debt; "frightfully," her husband had used the right word;
"hopelessly," so far as satisfying her creditors even out of the large
allowance Mr. Farrars made her; and still she had not the courage
voluntarily to tell the truth, which yet she knew must burst upon him ere
long. From what small beginnings had this Upas shadow come upon her! And
what "falseness, mea