a merest trifle nervous excitement will fix the attention! or how to the mental eye such a speck will grow and grow until it absorb the universe!  Only a certain other disquieting thought, having come once, would keep returning—­that, thoroughly as he believed himself acquainted with her mind, he had very little knowledge of her history.  He did not know a single friend of hers, had never met a person who knew any thing of her family, or had even an acquaintance with her earlier than his own.  The thing he most dreaded was, that the shadow of some old affection had returned upon her soul, and that, in her excessive delicacy, she heaped blame upon herself that she had not absolutely forgotten it.  He flung from him in scorn every slightest suggestion of blame. His Juliet! his glorious Juliet!  Bah!—­But he must get her to say what the matter was—­for her own sake; he must help her to reveal her trouble, whatever it might be—­else how was he to do his best to remove it!  She should find he knew how to be generous!

Thus thinking, he sat patient by her side, watching until the sun of her consciousness should rise and scatter the clouds of sleep.  Hour after hour he sat, and still she slept, outwearied with the rack of emotion.  Morning had begun to peer gray through the window-curtains, when she woke with a cry.

She had been dreaming.  In the little chapel in Nestley Park, she sat listening to the curate’s denouncement of hypocrisy, when suddenly the scene changed:  the pulpit had grown to a mighty cloud, upon which stood an archangel with a trumpet in his hand.  He cried that the hour of the great doom had come for all who bore within them the knowledge of any evil thing neither bemoaned before God nor confessed to man.  Then he lifted the great silver trumpet with a gleam to his lips, and every fiber of her flesh quivered in expectation of the tearing blast that was to follow; when instead, soft as a breath of spring from a bank of primroses, came the words, uttered in the gentlest of sorrowful voices, and the voice seemed that of her unbelieving Paul:  “I will arise and go to my Father.”  It was no wonder, therefore, that she woke with a cry.  It was one of indescribable emotion.  When she saw his face bending over her in anxious love, she threw her arms round his neck, burst into a storm of weeping, and sobbed.

“Oh Paul! husband! forgive me.  I have sinned against you terribly—­the worst sin a woman can commit.  Oh Paul!  Paul! make me clean, or I am lost.”

“Juliet, you are raving,” he said, bewildered, a little angry, and at her condition not a little alarmed.  For the confession, it was preposterous:  they had not been many weeks married!  “Calm yourself, or you will give me a lunatic for a wife!” he said.  Then changing his tone, for his heart rebuked him, when he saw the ashy despair that spread over her face and eyes, “Be still, my precious,” he went on.  “All is well.  You have been dreaming, and are not yet quite awake.  It is the morphia you had last night!  Don’t look so frightened.  It is only your husband.  No one else is near you.”