Mary heard with sorrow, and fear also, of the projected journey; but the altered expression of Isabella's countenance was a great palliative—dreadful as it was that her husband should love another (and of that distressing fact it was impossible to doubt), his confidence was consoling; and her power to prove the firmness of her character, her right to his esteem, and the immolation of her happiness to further his desires, had, in itself, the sustainment which belongs to great sacrifice. Suffer she must; but there are degrees of pain, and the whole catalogue of miseries which man, either from design or carelessness, inflicts on his weaker moiety, is trifling when compared to jealousy, as man himself occasionally knows from bitter experience.
Glentworth, a man of kind and generous nature, prone to all the gentler charities, habituated to the exercise of the affections, and to consideration for his fellow-creatures, however situated, was the last man on earth to have willingly or heedlessly oppressed the woman he had promised to protect, or swerve from the spirit of the promise he had made at the altar; but he knew not the depths of his own heart, the effect of habitual affections, and more especially the power which some women possess of rekindling, through memory and circumstance, flames which appear to have expired from lapse of time, or have been crushed by reason, by religion, or those circumstances which influence the tide of human affairs. She whom
