He stopped, out of breath, with fixed eyes and a rigid mouth.  Father Esteban drew a snuff-box from his pocket, and a large handkerchief.  After blowing his nose violently, he took a pinch of snuff, wiped his lip, and replaced the box.

“A bad habit, my son,” he said apologetically, “but an old man’s weakness.  Go on.”

“I met her first five years ago—­the wife of another man.  Don’t misjudge me, it was no lawless passion; it was a friendship, I believed, due to her intellectual qualities as much as to her womanly fascinations; for I was a young student, lodging in the same house with her, in an academic town.  Before I ever spoke to her of love, she had confided to me her own unhappiness—­the uncongeniality of her married life, the harshness, and even brutality, of her husband.  Even a man less in love than I was could have seen the truth of this—­the contrast of the coarse, sensual, and vulgar man with an apparently refined and intelligent woman; but any one else except myself would have suspected that such a union was not merely a sacrifice of the woman.  I believed her.  It was not until long afterwards that I learned that her marriage had been a condonation of her youthful errors by a complaisant bridegroom; that her character had been saved by a union that was a mutual concession.  But I loved her madly; and when she finally got a divorce from her uncongenial husband, I believed it less an expression of her love for me than an act of justice.  I did not know at the time that they had arranged the divorce together, as they had arranged their marriage, by equal concessions.

“I was the only son of a widowed mother, whose instincts were from the first opposed to my friendship with this woman, and what she prophetically felt would be its result.  Unfortunately, both she and my friends were foolish enough to avow their belief that the divorce was obtained solely with a view of securing me as a successor; and it was this argument more than any other that convinced me of my duty to protect her.  Enough, I married, not only in spite of all opposition—­but because of it.

“My mother would have reconciled herself to the marriage, but my wife never forgave the opposition, and, by some hellish instinct divining that her power over me might be weakened by maternal influence, precipitated a quarrel which forever separated us.  With the little capital left by my father, divided between my mother and myself, I took my wife to a western city.  Our small income speedily dwindled under the debts of her former husband, which she had assumed to purchase her freedom.  I endeavored to utilize a good education and some accomplishments in music and the languages by giving lessons and by contributing to the press.  In this my wife first made a show of assisting me, but I was not long in discovering that her intelligence was superficial and shallow, and that the audacity of expression, which I had believed to be originality of conviction, was simply shamelessness,