“In every word of hate spoken by you I would sympathize; every contemptuous expression of scorn, cast upon him from your heart, I would join in, tenfold.”

Barbara was shocked.  “He is your husband, after all,” she took leave to whisper.

“My husband!” broke forth Lady Levison, in agitation, seemingly.  “Yes! there’s the wrong.  Why did he, knowing what he was, delude me into becoming his wife?  You ought to feel for me, Mrs. Carlyle; and you do feel for me, for you are a wife and mother.  How dare these base men marry—­take to themselves an innocent, inexperienced girl, vowing, before God, to love and honor and cherish her?  Were not his other sins impediment enough but he must have crime, also, and woo me!  He has done me deep and irredeemable wrong, and has entailed upon his child an inheritance of shame.  What had he or I done to deserve it, I ask?”

Barbara felt half frightened at her vehemence; and Barbara might be thankful not to understand it.  All her native gentleness, all her reticence of feeling, as a wife and a gentlewoman, had been goaded out of her.  The process had been going on for some time, but this last revelation was the crowning point; and Alice, Lady Levison, turned round upon the world in her helpless resentment, as any poor wife, working in a garret, might have done.  There are certain wrongs which bring out human nature in the high-born, as well as in the low.  “Still he is your husband,” was all Barbara could, with deprecation, again plead.

“He made himself my husband by deceit, and I will throw him off in the face of day,” returned Lady Levison.  “There is no moral obligation why I should not.  He has worked ill and ruin—­ill and ruin upon me and my child, and the world shall never be allowed to think I have borne my share in it.  How was it you kept your hands off him, when he reappeared, to brave you, in West Lynne?” she added, in a changed tone, turning to Mr. Carlyle.

“I cannot tell.  I was a marvel oftentimes to myself.”

He quitted the room as he spoke, adding a few civil words about her with Mrs. Carlyle.  Barbara, not possessing the scruples of her husband, yielded to Lady Levison’s request, and gave her the outline of the dark tale.  Its outline only; and generously suppressing Afy’s name beyond the evening of the fatal event.  Lady Levison listened without interruption.

“Do you and Mr. Carlyle believe him to have been guilty?”

“Yes; but Mr. Carlyle will not express his opinion to the world.  He does not repay wrong with revenge.  I have heard him say that if the lifting of his finger would send the man to his punishment, he would tie down his hand rather than lift it.”

“Was his first wife, Isabel Vane, mad?” she presently asked.

“Mad!” echoed Barbara, in surprise.

“When she quitted him for the other.  It could have been nothing else than madness.  I could understand a woman’s flying from him for love of Mr. Carlyle; but now that I have seen your husband, I cannot understand the reverse side of the picture.  I thank you for your courtesy, Mrs. Carlyle.”