"I have not said so."

"It comes to that. I know how good you are; how much I owe to you. I
know that Dr. Wortle and yourself have been so kind to us, that were I not
grateful beyond expression I should be the meanest human creature. Do not
suppose that I am angry or vexed with you because you condemn me. It is
necessary that you should do so. But how can I condemn myself;--or how
can I condemn him?"

"If you are both free now, it may be made right."

"But how about repentance? Will it be all right though I shall not have
repented? I will never repent. There are laws in accordance with which I
will admit that I have done wrong; but had I not broken those laws when he
bade me, I should have hated myself through all my life afterwards."

"It was very different."

"If you could know, Mrs. Wortle, how difficult it would have been to go
away and leave him! It was not till he came to me and told me that he was
going down to Texas, to see how it had been with my husband, that I ever
knew what it was to love a man. He had never said a word. He tried not
to look it. But I knew that I had his heart and that he had mine. From
that moment I have thought of him day and night. When I gave him my hand
then as he parted from me, I gave it him as his own. It has been his to
do what he liked with it ever since, let who might live or who might die.
Ought I not to rejoice that he is dead?" Mrs. Wortle could not answer the
question. She could only shudder. "It was not by any will of my own,"
continued the eager woman, "that I married Ferdinand Lefroy. Everything
in our country was then destroyed. All that we loved and all that we
valued had been taken away from us. War had destroyed everything. When I
was just springing out of childhood, we were ruined. We had to go, all of
us; women as well as men, girls as well as boys;--and be something else
than we had been. I was told to marry him."

"That was wrong."

"When everything is in ruin about you, what room is there for ordinary
well-doing? It seemed then that he would have some remnant of property.
Our fathers had known each other long. The wretched man whom drink
afterwards made so vile might have been as good a gentleman as another, if
things had gone well with him. He could not have been a hero like him
whom I will always call my husband; but it is not given to every man to be
a hero."

"Was he bad always from the first?"

"He always drank,--from his