ll. Your next thoughts of me may remind you more
vividly and more boldly that your husband was once tried as a poisoner,
and that the question of his first wife's death was never properly
cleared up. Do you see what materials for a domestic hell are mingling
for us here? Was it for nothing that I warned you, solemnly warned you,
to draw back, when I found you bent on discovering the truth? Can I ever
be at your bedside now, when you are ill, and not remind you, in the
most innocent things I do, of what happened at that other bedside, in
the time of that other woman whom I married first? If I pour out your
medicine, I commit a suspicious action--they say I poisoned _her_ in
her medicine. If I bring you a cup of tea, I revive the remembrance of a
horrid doubt--they said I put the arsenic in _her_ cup of tea. If I kiss
you when I leave the room, I remind you that the prosecution accused
me of kissing _her,_ to save appearances and produce an effect on the
nurse. Can we live together on such terms as these? No mortal creatures
could support the misery of it. This very day I said to you, 'If you
stir a step further in this matter, there is an end of your happiness
for the rest of your life.' You have taken that step and the end has
come to your happiness and to mine. The blight that cankers and kills is
on you and on me for the rest of our lives!"

So far I had forced myself to listen to him. At those last words the
picture of the future that he was placing before me became too hideous
to be endured. I refused to hear more.

"You are talking horribly," I said. "At your age and at mine, have we
done with love and done with hope? It is blasphemy to Love and Hope to
say it!"

"Wait till you have read the Trial," he answered. "You mean to read it,
I suppose?"

"Every word of it! With a motive, Eustace, which you have yet to know."

"No motive of yours, Valeria, no love and hope of yours, can alter the
inexorable facts. My first wife died poisoned; and the verdict of the
jury has not absolutely acquitted me of the guilt of causing her death.
As long as you were ignorant of that the possibilities of happiness were
always within our reach. Now you know it, I say again--our married life
is at an end."

"No," I said. "Now I know it, our married life has begun--begun with a
new object for your wife's devotion, with a new reason for your wife's
love!"

"What do you mean?"

I went near to him again, and took his hand.

"What