Her husband was at hand—that is to say, under the same roof, and at that moment in the room in which the blind woman was now sitting, bleeding from her head and hand, and smiling as she talked, with the false light of a malignant irony.

“So, husband and wife are met again! And what have you to say after so long a time?”

“I’ve nothing to say. Let my deeds speak. I’ve given you year by year fully half my income.”

She laughed scornfully, and exclaimed merely—

“Magnificent man!”

“Miserable pittance it is, but the more miserable, the harder the sacrifice for me. I don’t say I have been able to do much; but I have done more than my means warrant, and I don’t understand what you propose to yourself by laying yourself out to torment and embarrass me. What the devil do you follow me about for? Do you think I’m fool enough to be bullied?”

“A fine question from Charles Vairfield of Wyvern to his wife!” she observed with a pallid simper.

“Wife and husband are terms very easily pronounced,” said he.

“And relations very easily made,” she rejoined.

He was leaning with his shoulder against the high mantelpiece, and looking upon her with a countenance in which you might have seen disdain and fear mingling with something of compunction.

“Relations very easily made, and still more easily affected,” he replied. “Come, Bertha, there is no use in quarrelling over points of law. Past is past, as Leonora says. If I have wronged you in anything I am sorry. I’ve tried to make amends; and though many a fellow would have been tired out long ago, I continue to give you proofs that I am not.”

“That is a sort of benevolence,” she said, in her own language, “which may as well be voluntary, for, if it be not, the magistrates will compel it.”

“The magistrates are neither fools nor tyrants. You’ll make nothing of the magistrates. You have no rights, and you know it.”

“An odd country where a wife has no rights.”

“Come, Bertha, there is no use in picking a quarrel. While you take me quietly you have your share, and a good deal more. You used to be reasonable.”

“A reasonable wife, I suppose, gives up her position, her character, her prospects, whenever it answers her husband to sacrifice these trifles for his villainous pleasures. Your English wives must be meek souls indeed if they like it. I don’t hear they are such lambs though.”

“I’m not going to argue law points, as I said before. Lawyers are the proper persons to do that. You used to be reasonable. Bertha—where’s the good in pushing things to extremes?”

“What a gentle creature you are,” she laughed, “and how persuasive!”

“I’m a quiet fellow enough, I believe, as men go, but I’m not persuasive, and I know it. I wish I were.”

“Those whom you have persuaded once are not likely to be persuaded again. Your persuasions are not always lucky. Are they?”

“You want to quarrel about everything. You want to leave no possible point of agreement.”

“Things are at a bad pass when husband and wife are so.”

Charles looked at her angrily for a moment, and then down to the floor, and he whistled a few bars of a tune.

“What do you whistle for?” she demanded.

“Come, Bertha, don’t be foolish.”

“You were once a gentleman. It is a blackguard who whistles in reply to a lady’s words,” she said, on a sudden stretching out her hand tremulously, as if in search of some one to grasp.

“Well, don’t mind. Stick to one thing at a time. For God’s sake say what you want, and have done with it.”

“You must acknowledge me before the world for your wife,” she answered with resolute serenity, and raising her face, and shutting her mouth she sniffed defiantly through her distended nostrils.

“Come, come, Bertha, what good on earth could come of that?”

“Little to you, perhaps.”

“And none to you.”

She laughed savagely. “That lie won’t do.”

“Bertha, Bertha, we may hate one another if you will. But is it not as well to try whether we can agree upon anything. Let us just for the present talk intelligibly.”

“You tried to murder me, you arch-villain.”

“Nonsense,” said he, turning pale, “how can you talk so—how can you? Could I help interposing? You may well be thankful that I did.”

“You tried to murder me,” she screamed.

“You know that’s false. I took the knife from your hand, and by doing so I saved two lives. It was you—not I— who hurt your hand.”

“You villain, you damned villain, I wish I could kill you dead.”

“All the worse for you. Bertha.”

“I wish you were dead and cold in your bed, and my hand on your face to be sure of it.”

“Now you’re growing angry again. I thought we had done with storm and hysterics for a little, and could talk, and perhaps agree upon something, or at all events not waste our few minutes in violence.”

“Violence!—you wretch, who began it?”