days of pent-up affection.  She did her best to meet him as if nothing had happened.  For indeed what had happened—­except her going to church?  If nothing had taken place since she saw him—­since she knew him—­why such perturbation?  Was marriage a slavery of the very soul, in which a wife was bound to confess every thing to her husband, even to her most secret thoughts and feelings?  Or was a husband lord not only over the present and future of his wife, but over her past also?  Was she bound to disclose every thing that lay in that past?  If Paul made no claim upon her beyond the grave, could he claim back upon the dead past before he knew her, a period over which she had now no more control than over that when she would be but a portion of the material all?

But whatever might be Paul’s theories of marriage or claims upon his wife, it was enough for her miserable unrest that she was what is called a living soul, with a history, and what has come to be called a conscience—­a something, that is, as most people regard it, which has the power, and uses it, of making uncomfortable.

The existence of such questions as I have indicated reveals that already between her and him there showed space, separation, non-contact:  Juliet was too bewildered with misery to tell whether it was a cleft of a hair’s breadth, or a gulf across which no cry could reach; this moment it seemed the one, the next the other.  The knowledge which caused it had troubled her while he sought her love, had troubled her on to the very eve of her surrender.  The deeper her love grew the more fiercely she wrestled with the evil fact.  A low moral development and the purest resolve of an honest nature afforded her many pleas, and at length she believed she had finally put it down.  She had argued that, from the opinions themselves of Faber, the thing could not consistently fail to be as no thing to him.  Even were she mistaken in this conclusion, it would be to wrong his large nature, his generous love, his unselfish regard, his tender pitifulness, to fail of putting her silent trust in him.  Besides, had she not read in the newspapers the utterance of a certain worshipful judge on the bench that no man had any thing to do with his wife’s ante-nuptial history?  The contract then was certainly not retrospective.  What in her remained unsatisfied after all her arguments, reasons, and appeals to common sense and consequences, she strove to strangle, and thought, hoped, she had succeeded.  She willed her will, made up her mind, yielded to Paul’s solicitations, and put the whole painful thing away from her.