Mrs. Wyatt herself was far more agreeable.  That is to say, she was chatty; and to be chatty is no slight recommendation at sea.  She became excessively intimate with most of the ladies; and, to my profound astonishment, evinced no equivocal disposition to coquet with the men.  She amused us all very much.  I say “amused”—­and scarcely know how to explain myself.  The truth is, I soon found that Mrs. W. was far oftener laughed at than with.  The gentlemen said little about her; but the ladies, in a little while, pronounced her a “good-hearted thing, rather indifferent-looking, totally uneducated, and decidedly vulgar.”  The great wonder was, how Wyatt had been entrapped into such a match.  Wealth was the general solution—­but this I knew to be no solution at all; for Wyatt had told me that she neither brought him a dollar nor had any expectations from any source whatever.  “He had married,” he said, “for love, and for love only; and his bride was far more than worthy of his love.”  When I thought of these expressions, on the part of my friend, I confess that I felt indescribably puzzled.  Could it be possible that he was taking leave of his senses?  What else could I think? He, so refined, so intellectual, so fastidious, with so exquisite a perception of the faulty, and so keen an appreciation of the beautiful!  To be sure, the lady seemed especially fond of him—­particularly so in his absence—­when, she made herself ridiculous by frequent quotations of what had been said by her “beloved husband, Mr. Wyatt.”  The word “husband” seemed forever—­to use one of her own delicate expressions—­forever “on the tip of her tongue.”  In the meantime, it was observed by all on board, that he avoided her in the most pointed manner, and, for the most part, shut himself up alone in his state-room, where, in fact, he might have been said to live altogether, leaving his wife at full liberty to amuse herself as she thought best, in the public society of the main cabin.

My conclusion, from what I saw and heard, was, that the artist, by some unaccountable freak of fate, or perhaps in some fit of enthusiastic and fanciful passion, had been induced to unite himself with a person altogether beneath him, and that the natural result, entire and speedy disgust, had ensued.  I pitied him from the bottom of my heart—­but could not, for that reason, quite forgive his incommunicativeness in the matter of the “Last Supper.”  For this I resolved to have my revenge.

One day he came upon deck, and, taking his arm as had been my wont, I sauntered with him backward and forward.  His gloom, however (which I considered quite natural under the circumstances), seemed entirely unabated.  He said little, and that moodily, and with evident effort.  I ventured a jest or two, and he made a sickening attempt at a smile.  Poor fellow! as I thought of his wife, I wondered that he could have heart to put on even the semblance