Now that the reader is in the secret of Mr. Quest’s life, it will perhaps help him to understand the apparent strangeness of his conduct with reference to his wife and Edward Cossey.  It is quite true that Belle did not know the full extent of her husband’s guilt.  She did not know that he was not her husband, but she did know that nearly all of her little fortune had been paid over to another woman, and that woman a common, vulgar woman, as one of Edith’s letters which had fallen into her hands by chance very clearly showed her.  Therefore, had he attempted to expose her proceedings or even to control her actions, she had in her hand an effective weapon of defence wherewith she could and would have given blow for blow.  This state of affairs of necessity forced each party to preserve an armed neutrality towards the other, whilst they waited for a suitable opportunity to assert themselves.  Not that their objects were quite the same.  Belle merely wished to be free from her husband, whom she had always disliked, and whom she now positively hated with that curious hatred which women occasionally conceive toward those to whom they are legally bound, when they have been bad enough or unfortunate enough to fall in love with somebody else.  He, on the contrary, had that desire for revenge upon her which even the gentler stamp of man is apt to conceive towards one who, herself the object of his strong affection, daily and hourly repels and repays it with scorn and infidelity.  He did love her truly; she was the one living thing in all his bitter lonely life to whom his heart had gone out.  True, he put pressure on her to marry him, or what comes to the same thing, allowed and encouraged her drunken old father to do so.  But he had loved her and still loved her, and yet she mocked at him, and in the face of that fact about the money—­her money, which he had paid away to the other woman, a fact which it was impossible for him to explain except by admission of guilt which would be his ruin, what was he to urge to convince her of this, even had she been open to conviction?  But it was bitter to him, bitter beyond all conception, to have this, the one joy of his life, snatched from him.  He threw himself with ardour into the pursuit after wealth and dignity of position, partly because he had a legitimate desire for these things, and partly to assuage the constant irritation of his mind, but to no purpose.  These two spectres of his existence, his tiger wife and the fair woman who was his wife in name, constantly marched side by side before him, blotting out the beauty from every scene and souring the sweetness of every joy.  But if in his pain he thirsted for revenge upon Belle, who would have none of him, how much more did he desire to be avenged upon Edward Cossey, who, as it were, had in sheer wantonness robbed him of the one good thing he had?  It made him mad to think that this man, to whom he knew himself to be in every way superior, should have had the power thus to injure him, and he longed to pay him back measure for measure, and through his heart’s affections to strike him as mortal a blow as he had himself received.