knew what had passed; even about Amanda and any possible change in her future he was listless.  He had never been a man of plans, and had no room for any now under the rubbish of a collapsed life.  His days were gloomy and his nights troubled.  He dreamed constantly either of Amanda’s mother, or of Juliet—­sometimes of both together, and of endless perplexity between them.  Sometimes he woke weeping.  He did not now despise his tears, for they flowed neither from suffering nor self-pity, but from love and sorrow and repentance.  A question of the possibility of his wife’s being yet alive would occasionally occur to him, but he always cast the thought from him as a folly in which he dared not indulge lest it should grow upon him and unman him altogether.  Better she were dead than suffering what his cruelty might have driven her to:  he had weakened her self-respect by insult, and then driven her out helpless.

People said he took the loss of his wife coolly; but the fact was that, in every quiet way, he had been doing all man could do to obtain what information concerning her there might possibly be to be had.  Naturally he would have his proceedings as little as possible in the public mouth; and to employ the police or the newspapers in such a quest was too horrible.  But he had made inquiries in all directions.  He had put a question or two to Polwarth, but at that time he knew nothing of her, and did not feel bound to disclose his suspicions.  Not knowing to what it might not expose her, he would not betray the refuge of a woman with a woman.  Faber learned what every body had learned, and for a time was haunted by the horrible expectation of further news from the lake.  Every knock at the door made him start and turn pale.  But the body had not floated, and would not now.

We have seen that, in the light thrown upon her fault from the revived memory of his own, a reaction had set in:  the tide of it grew fiercer as it ran.  He had deposed her idol—­the God who she believed could pardon, and the bare belief in whom certainly could comfort her; he had taken the place with her of that imaginary, yet, for some, necessary being; but when, in the agony of repentant shame, she looked to him for the pardon he alone could give her, he had turned from her with loathing, contempt, and insult!  He was the one in the whole-earth, who, by saying to her Let it be forgotten, could have lifted her into life and hope!  She had trusted in him, and he, an idol indeed, had crumbled in the clinging arms of her faith!  Had she not confessed to him what else he would never have known, humbling herself in a very ecstasy of repentance?  Was it not an honor to any husband to have been so trusted by his wife?  And had he not from very scorn refused to strike her!  Was she not a woman still? a being before whom a man, when he can no longer worship, must weep?  Could any fault, ten times worse than she had committed, make her that