none but a madman would. The gross improbability of the whole thing; the unlikelihood that you should be in so indecent a hurry to marry another man the moment my back was turned; the strangeness of your mother's abetting your rash act by her pre-sence, when she had countenanced your engagement to me; your father's absence, and the tacit disobedience displayed to him by the marriage in his absence—all these unnatural circumstances I recognised clearly enough, but they vanished before the one great fact that you were married; how or why, or where, mattered little enough—you were Tempest's wife."
"And then?" I ask, lifting my dull eyes to his bleached, wild face.
"And then I went mad—as utterly mad for the time as any wretch in Bedlam; as drunk with grief as any senseless beast on the pavement; as incapable as either of accounting for or guiding my actions. Well, I wandered about all that day; at night I found myself back again in my rooms; and, as I sat there, my despair at losing you gave way to a fierce fury—that you should have dared to so trick and shame me; you, who had known of the disappointment I had found in my first love; you, to stab me so surely to the heart, who knew how entirely my whole life and belief in all things rested on the trust I had in your honesty and faithfulness. In that hour my love for you seemed to pass away even more utterly than it had done for Silvia when I found out her falsehood, for, be her sin what it might, she had been true to me, while you had deliberately left me without a pang, without a care.
"As I sat there, out of the darkness suddenly came clinging arms, and stole round my neck, drawing my burning head down to a soft embrace; a tender voice, gentle as a mother's, whispered words of comfort in my ear. I did not know whether I was actually mad or dreaming. Had an angel dropped from heaven to tend me, or was my unknown consoler some earthly creature, like
