We lived in a round of visits for some time after our return home, giving splendid dinner-parties, and making a sensation in our neighbourhood by the new lustre of our equipage, for my father had reserved this display of his increased wealth for the period of his son’s marriage; and we gave our acquaintances liberal opportunity for remarking that it was a pity I made so poor a figure as an heir and a bridegroom.  The nervous fatigue of this existence, the insincerities and platitudes which I had to live through twice over—­through my inner and outward sense—­would have been maddening to me, if I had not had that sort of intoxicated callousness which came from the delights of a first passion.  A bride and bridegroom, surrounded by all the appliances of wealth, hurried through the day by the whirl of society, filling their solitary moments with hastily-snatched caresses, are prepared for their future life together as the novice is prepared for the cloister—­by experiencing its utmost contrast.

Through all these crowded excited months, Bertha’s inward self remained shrouded from me, and I still read her thoughts only through the language of her lips and demeanour:  I had still the human interest of wondering whether what I did and said pleased her, of longing to hear a word of affection, of giving a delicious exaggeration of meaning to her smile.  But I was conscious of a growing difference in her manner towards me; sometimes strong enough to be called haughty coldness, cutting and chilling me as the hail had done that came across the sunshine on our marriage morning; sometimes only perceptible in the dexterous avoidance of a tete-a-tete walk or dinner to which I had been looking forward.  I had been deeply pained by this—­had even felt a sort of crushing of the heart, from the sense that my brief day of happiness was near its setting; but still I remained dependent on Bertha, eager for the last rays of a bliss that would soon be gone for ever, hoping and watching for some after-glow more beautiful from the impending night.

I remember—­how should I not remember?—­the time when that dependence and hope utterly left me, when the sadness I had felt in Bertha’s growing estrangement became a joy that I looked back upon with longing as a man might look back on the last pains in a paralysed limb.  It was just after the close of my father’s last illness, which had necessarily withdrawn us from society and thrown us more on each other.  It was the evening of father’s death.  On that evening the veil which had shrouded Bertha’s soul from me—­had made me find in her alone among my fellow-beings the blessed possibility of mystery, and doubt, and expectation—­was first withdrawn.  Perhaps it was the first day since the beginning of my passion for her, in which that passion was completely neutralized by the presence of an absorbing feeling of another kind.  I had been watching by my father’s deathbed:  I had been witnessing the last fitful yearning glance