Nora was silent for some minutes, but at last she spoke.  ’Why do you not go back to him, Emily?’

‘How am I to go back to him?  What am I to do to make him take me back?’ At this very moment Trevelyan was in the house, but they did not know it.

‘Write to him,’ said Nora.

’What am I to say?  In very truth I do believe that he is mad.  If I write to him, should I defend myself or accuse myself?  A dozen times I have striven to write such a letter, not that I might send it, but that I might find what I could say should I ever wish to send it.  And it is impossible.  I can only tell him how unjust he has been, how cruel, how mad, how wicked!’

’Could you not say to him simply this?  “Let us be together, wherever it may be; and let bygones be bygones."’

’While he is watching me with a policeman?  While he is still thinking that I entertain a lover?  While he believes that I am the base thing that he has dared to think me?’

‘He has never believed it.’

’Then how can he be such a villain as to treat me like this?  I could not go to him, Nora not unless I went to him as one who was known to be mad, over whom in his wretched condition it would be my duty to keep watch.  In no other way could I overcome my abhorrence of the outrages to which he has subjected me.’

‘But for the child’s sake, Emily.’

’Ah, yes!  If it were simply to grovel in the dust before him it should be done.  If humiliation would suffice, or any self-abasement that were possible to me!  But I should be false if I said that I look forward to any such possibility.  How can he wish to have me back again after what he has said and done?  I am his wife, and he has disgraced me before all men by his own words.  And what have I done, that I should not have done; what left undone on his behalf that I should have done?  It is hard that the foolish workings of a weak man’s mind should be able so completely to ruin the prospects of a woman’s life!’

Nora was beginning to answer this by attempting to shew that the husband’s madness was, perhaps, only temporary, when there came a knock at the door, and Mrs Outhouse was at once in the room.  It will be well that the reader should know what had taken place at the parsonage while the two sisters had been together upstairs, so that the nature of Mrs Outhouse’s mission to them may explain itself.  Mr Outhouse had been in his closet downstairs, when the maid-servant brought word to him that Mr Trevelyan was in the parlour, and was desirous of seeing him.

‘Mr Trevelyan!’ said the unfortunate clergyman, holding up both his hands.  The servant understood the tragic importance of the occasion quite as well as did her master, and simply shook her head.  ’Has your mistress seen him?’ said the master.  The girl again shook her head.  ‘Ask your mistress to come to me,’ said the clergyman.  Then the girl disappeared; and in a few minutes Mrs Outhouse, equally imbued with the tragic elements of the day, was with her husband.