If she were to be so foolish as let him know, how would it strike Paul?  What would he think of it?  Ought she not to be sure of that before she committed herself—­before she uttered the irrevocable words?  Would he call it a trifle, or would he be ready to kill her?  True, he had no right, he could have no right to know; but how horrible that there should be any thought of right between them! still worse, any thing whatever between them that he had no right to know! worst of all, that she did not belong to him so utterly that he must have a right to know every thing about her!  She would tell him all!  She would! she would! she had no choice! she must!—­But she need not tell him now.  She was not strong enough to utter the necessary words.  But that made the thing very dreadful!  If she could not speak the words, how bad it must really be!—­Impossible to tell her Paul!  That was pure absurdity.—­Ah, but she could not!  She would be certain to faint—­or fall dead at his feet.  That would be well!—­Yes! that would do!  She would take a wine-glass full of laudanum just before she told him; then, if he was kind, she would confess the opium, and he could save her if he pleased; if he was hard, she would say nothing, and die at his feet.  She had hoped to die in his arms—­all that was left of eternity.  But her life was his, he had saved it with his own—­oh horror! that it should have been to disgrace him!—­and it should not last a moment longer than it was a pleasure to him.

Worn out with thought and agony, she often fell asleep—­only to start awake in fresh misery, and go over and over the same torturing round.  Long before her husband appeared, she was in a burning fever.  When he came, he put her at once to bed, and tended her with a solicitude as anxious as it was gentle.  He soothed her to sleep, and then went and had some dinner.

On his return, finding, as he had expected, that she still slept, he sat down by her bedside, and watched.  Her slumber was broken with now and then a deep sigh, now and then a moan.  Alas, that we should do the things that make for moan!—­but at least I understand why we are left to do them:  it is because we can.  A dull fire was burning in her soul, and over it stood the caldron of her history, and it bubbled in sighs and moans.

Faber was ready enough to attribute every thing human to a physical origin, but as he sat there pondering her condition, recalling her emotion and strange speech of the night before, and watching the state she was now in, an uneasiness began to gather—­undefined, but other than concerned her health.  Something must be wrong somewhere.  He kept constantly assuring himself that at worst it could be but some mere moleheap, of which her lovelily sensitive organization, under the influence of a foolish preachment, made a mountain.  Still, it was a huge disorder to come from a trifle!  At the same time who knew better than he upon what