you should leave Mrs. Stanbury's house. I do not wonder
that it should be so. I shall immediately seek for a
future home for you, and when I have found one that is
suitable, I will have you conveyed to it.

I must now further explain my purposes,--and I must beg
you to remember that I am driven to do so by your direct
disobedience to my expressed wishes. Should there be any
further communication between you and Colonel Osborne,
not only will I take your child away from you, but I will
also limit the allowance to be made to you to a bare
sustenance. In such case, I shall put the matter into the
hands of a lawyer, and shall probably feel myself driven
to take steps towards freeing myself from a connection
which will be disgraceful to my name.

For myself, I shall live abroad during the greater part of
the year. London has become to me uninhabitable, and all
English pleasures are distasteful.

Yours affectionately,

LOUIS TREVELYAN.

When he had finished this he read it twice, and believed that he had
written, if not an affectionate, at any rate a considerate letter.
He had no bounds to the pity which he felt for himself in reference
to the injury which was being done to him, and he thought that the
offers which he was making, both in respect to his child and the
money, were such as to entitle him to his wife's warmest gratitude.
He hardly recognised the force of the language which he used when he
told her that her conduct was disgraceful, and that she had disgraced
his name. He was quite unable to look at the whole question between
him and his wife from her point of view. He conceived it possible
that such a woman as his wife should be told that her conduct would
be watched, and that she should be threatened with the Divorce Court,
with an effect that should, upon the whole, be salutary. There
be men, and not bad men either, and men neither uneducated, or
unintelligent, or irrational in ordinary matters, who seem to be
absolutely unfitted by nature to have the custody or guardianship of
others. A woman in the hands of such a man can hardly save herself or
him from endless trouble. It may be that between such a one and his
wife, events shall flow on so evenly that no ruling, no constraint
is necessary,--that even the giving of advice is never called for
by the circumstances of the day. If the man be happily forced to
labour daily for his living till he be wea