“Now, don’t, Irene!  Don’t take on so, daughter!  I love you still, and we will be happy here, as in other days.”

“Yes, father,” said Irene, holding down her head and calming her voice, “we will be happy here, as in the dear old time.  Oh we will be very happy together.  I won’t leave you any more.”

“I wish you had never left me,” he answered, mournfully; “I was always afraid of this—­always afraid.  But don’t let it break your heart; I’m all the same; nothing will ever turn me against you.  I hope he hasn’t been very unkind to you?” His voice grew a little severe.

“We wont say anything against him,” replied Irene, trying to understand exactly her father’s state of mind and accommodate herself thereto.  “Forgive and forget is the wisest rule always.”

“Yes, dear, that’s it.  Forgive and forget—­forgive and forget.  There’s nothing like it in this world.  I’m glad to hear you talk so.”

The mind of Mr. Delancy did not again wander from the truth.  But the shock received when it first came upon him with stunning force had taken away his keen perception of the calamity.  He was sad, troubled and restless, and talked a great deal about the unhappy position of his daughter—­sometimes in a way that indicated much incoherence of thought.  To this state succeeded one of almost total silence, and he would sit for hours, if not aroused from reverie and inaction by his daughter, in apparent dreamy listlessness.  His conversation, when he did talk on any subject, showed, however, that his mind had regained its old clearness.

On the third day after Irene’s arrival at Ivy Cliff, her trunks came up from New York.  She had packed them on the night before leaving her husband’s house, and marked them with her name and that of her father’s residence.  No letter or message accompanied them.  She did not expect nor desire any communication, and was not therefore disappointed, but rather relieved from what would have only proved a cause of disturbance.  All angry feelings toward her husband had subsided; but no tender impulses moved in her heart, nor did the feeblest thought of reconciliation breathe over the surface of her mind.  She had been in bonds; now the fetters were cast off, and she loved freedom too well to bend her neck again to the yoke.

No tender impulses moved, we have said, in her heart, for it lay like a palsied thing, dead in her bosom—­dead, we mean, so far as the wife was concerned.  It was not so palsied on that fatal evening when the last strife with her husband closed.  But in the agony that followed there came, in mercy, a cold paralysis; and now toward Hartley Emerson her feelings were as calm as the surface of a frozen lake.

And how was it with the deserted husband?  Stern and unyielding also.  The past year had been marked by so little of mutual tenderness, there had been so few passages of love between them—­green spots in the desert of their lives—­that memory brought hardly a relic from the past over which the heart could brood.  For the sake of worldly appearances, Emerson most regretted the unhappy event.  Next, his trouble was for Irene and her father, but most for Irene.