simply looked to Florence’s comfort and happiness.  That Florence should not suffer the pang of having been deceived and rejected was all in all to Cecilia.  “Of course she must know it some day,” the wife had pleaded to her husband.  “He is not the man to keep anything secret.  But if she is told when he has returned to her, and is good to her, the happiness of the return will cure the other misery.”  But Burton would not submit to this.  “To be comfortable at present is not everything,” he said.  “If the man be so miserably weak that he does not even now know his own mind, Florence had better take her punishment, and be quit of him.”

Cecilia had narrated to him with passable fidelity what had occurred upstairs, while he was sitting alone in the dining-room.  That she in her anger had at one moment spurned Harry Clavering, and that in the next she had knelt to him, imploring him to come back to Florence—­those two little incidents she did not tell to her husband.  Harry’s adventures with Lady Ongar, as far as she knew them, she described accurately.  “I can’t make any apology for him; upon my life I can’t,” said Burton.  “If I know what it is for a man to behave ill, falsely, like a knave in such matters, he is so behaving.”  So Theodore Burton spoke as he took his candle to go away to his work; but his wife had induced him to promise that he would not write to Stratton or take any other step in the matter till they had waited twenty-four hours for Harry’s promised letter.

The letter came before the twenty-four hours were expired, and Burton, on his return home on the Saturday, found himself called upon to read and pass judgment upon Harry’s confession.  “What right has he to speak of her as his darling Florence,” he exclaimed, “while he is confessing his own knavery?”

“But if she is his darling—?” pleaded his wife.

“Trash!  But the word from him in such a letter is simply an additional insult.  And what does he know about this woman who has come back?  He vouches for her, but what can he know of her?  Just what she tells him.  He is simply a fool.”

“But you cannot dislike him for believing her word.”

“Cecilia,” said he, holding down the letter as he spoke—­“you are so carried away by your love for Florence, and your fear lest a marriage which has been once talked of should not take place, that you shut your eyes to this man’s true character.  Can you believe any good of a man who tells you to your face that he is engaged to two women at once?”

“I think I can,” said Cecilia, hardly venturing to express so dangerous an opinion above her breath.

“And what would you think of a woman who did so?”

“Ah, that is so different!  I cannot explain it, but you know that it is different.”

“I know that you would forgive a man anything, and a woman nothing.”  To this she submitted in silence, having probably heard the reproof before, and he went on to finish the letter.  “Not defending himself!” he exclaimed—­“then why does he not defend himself?  When a man tells me that he does not, or cannot defend himself I know that he is a sorry fellow, without a spark of spirit.”