wretchedness, dating from within two or three months of the marriage; and finally consummated by a disclosure that, if provable, might consign Harlowe to the hulks.  The tears, the agony, the despair of the unhappy lady, excited in me a savageness of feeling, an eager thirst for vengeance, which I had believed foreign to my nature.  Edith divined my thoughts, and taking my hand, said, “Never, sir, never will I appear against him:  the father of my little Helen shall never be publicly accused by me.”

“You err, Edith,” I rejoined; “it is a positive duty to bring so consummate a villain to justice.  He has evidently calculated on your gentleness of disposition, and must be disappointed.”

I soon, however, found it was impossible to shake her resolution on this point; and I returned with a heart full of grief and bitterness to Mr. Harlowe.

“You will oblige me, sir,” I exclaimed as I entered the room, “by leaving this house immediately:  I would hold no further converse with so vile a person.”

“How!  Do you know to whom you presume to speak in this manner?”

“Perfectly.  You are one Harlowe, who, after a few months’ residence with a beautiful and amiable girl, had extinguished the passion which induced him to offer her marriage, showered on her every species of insult and indignity of which a cowardly and malignant nature is capable; and who, finding that did not kill her, at length consummated, or revealed, I do not yet know which term is most applicable, his utter baseness by causing her to be informed that his first wife was still living.”

“Upon my honor, sir, I believed, when I married Miss Willoughby, that I was a widower.”

“Your honor! But except to prove that I do thoroughly know and appreciate the person I am addressing, I will not bandy words with you.  After that terrible disclosure—­if, indeed, it be a disclosure, not an invention—­Ah, you start at that”

“At your insolence, sir; not at your senseless surmises.”

“Time and the law will show.  After, I repeat, this terrible disclosure or invention, you, not content with obtaining from your victim’s generosity a positive promise that she would not send you to the hulks”—­

“Sir, have a care.”

“Pooh!  I say, not content with exacting this promise from your victim, you, with your wife, or accomplice, threatened not only to take her child from her, but to lock her up in a madhouse, unless she subscribed a paper, confessing that she knew, when you espoused her, that you were a married man.  Now, sir, do I, or do I not, thoroughly know who and what the man is I am addressing?”

“Sir,” returned Harlowe, recovering his audacity somewhat.  “Spite of all your hectoring and abuse, I defy you to obtain proof—­legal proof—­whether what Edith has heard is true or false.  The affair may perhaps be arranged; let her return with me.”

“You know she would die first; but it is quite useless to prolong this conversation; and I again request you to leave this house.”