I cannot distinguish the precise proportion of cruelty in this letter.  Did the writer designedly torture Butts by telling his wife, or did he really think that she would in the end be happier because Butts would not have a secret reserved from her,—­a temptation to lying—­and because with this secret in her possession, he might perhaps be restrained in future?  Nobody knows.  All we know is that there are very few human actions of which it can be said that this or that taken by itself produced them.  With our inborn tendency to abstract, to separate mentally the concrete into factors which do not exist separately, we are always disposed to assign causes which are too simple, and which, in fact, have no being in rerum natura.  Nothing in nature is propelled or impeded by one force acting alone.  There is no such thing, save in the brain of the mathematician.  I see no reason why even motives diametrically opposite should not unite in one resulting deed, and think it very probable that the squire was both cruel and merciful to the same person in the letter; influenced by exactly conflicting passions, whose conflict ended so.

As to the squire and his wife, they lived together just as before.  I do not think, that, excepting the four persons concerned, anybody ever heard a syllable about the affair, save myself a long while afterwards.  Clem, however, packed up and left the town, after selling his business.  He had a reputation for restlessness; and his departure, although it was sudden, was no surprise.  He betook himself to Australia, his wife going with him.  I heard that they had gone, and heard also that he was tired of school-keeping in England, and had determined to try his fortune in another part of the world.  Our friendship had dwindled to nothing, and I thought no more about him.  Mrs. Butts never uttered one word of reproach to her husband.  I cannot say that she loved him as she could have loved, but she had accepted him, and she said to herself that as perhaps it was through her lack of sympathy with him that he had strayed, it was her duty more and more to draw him to herself.  She had a divine disposition, not infrequent amongst women, to seek in herself the reason for any wrong which was done to her.  That almost instinctive tendency in men, to excuse, to transfer blame to others, to be angry with somebody else when they suffer from the consequences of their own misdeeds, in her did not exist.

During almost the whole of her married life, before this affair between the squire and Clem, Mrs. Butts had had much trouble, although her trouble was, perhaps, rather the absence of joy than the presence of any poignant grief.  She was much by herself.  She had never been a great reader, but in her frequent solitude she was forced to do something in order to obtain relief, and she naturally turned to the Bible.  It would be foolish to say that the Bible alone was to be credited with the support she received.