She has destroyed herself! That was the keynote to all his thoughts. Destroyed herself, made away with herself! Destroyed herself! He was not much of a reading man--had not time for it in all his occupations; but what were those two lines which would keep surging up into his beating brain, and from time to time finding expression on his trembling tongue--  
 
"Rashly importunate,
Gone to her death!"
 
Gone to her death! He repeated the words a thousand times. Dead now; gone to her last account, as Shakespeare says, "with all her imperfections on her head." Gone, without chance or power of recall; gone without a word of explanation between them, without a word of sympathy, without a word of forgiveness on either side. He had often pictured their parting, he dying, she dying, and had imagined the scene; how, whichever of them found life ebbing away, would say that they had misunderstood the other perhaps, and that perhaps life might have been made more to each, had they been more suitable; but that they had been faithful, and so on; and perhaps hereafter they might, &c. He had thought of this often; but the end had come now, and his ideas had not been realised. There had been no parting, no mutual forgiveness, no last words of tenderness and hope. He had not been there to soothe her dying hour; to tell her how he acknowledged all her goodness, and how, though perhaps he had not made much outward manifestation, he had always thoroughly appreciated the discharge of her wifely duties to him. He had not been present to have one whispered explanation of how each had misunderstood the other, and how both had been in the wrong; to share in one common prayer for forgiveness, and one common hope of future meeting. There had been no explanation, no forgiveness; he had parted from her almost as he might from any everyday acquaintance; he had written to her such a letter as he might have written to Whittaker, who had taken his practice temporarily; and now he returned to find her dead! Worse than dead! Dead probably by her own act, by her own hand!
 
Stay! He was losing his head now; his pulse was at fever-heat, his skin dry and hot. Why had this terrible supposition taken such fast hold upon him? There was the evidence of the ring and of the leaden seal. Certainly practical evidence; but the motive--where was the motive? Suppose now--and a horrible shudder ran through him as the supposition crossed his mind--suppose now that this had become a matter for legal inquiry? suppose--Heaven knows how--suppose that the servants had suspected, and had talked, and--and the law had interfered--what motive would have been put forward for Mabel's self-destruction? He and she had never had a word of contention since their marriage; no one could prove that there had ever been the smallest disagreement between them; her home had been such as befitted her station; no word could be breathed against her husband's character; and yet--
 
 
"Anywhere, anywhere,
 
Out of the world!"
 
that was another couplet from the same poem that was fixed in his brain, and that he found himself constantly quoting, when he was trying to assign reasons for his wife's suicide. Was Henrietta Prendergast right, after all? Had his whole married life been a mistake, a Dead-Sea apple without even the gorgeous external, a hollow sham, a delusion, and a mockery culminating in the semblance of a crime? "Anywhere out of the world," eh? And "out of the world" had meant at first, in the early days, when the first faint dawnings of discontent rose in her mind,--then "anywhere out of the world" was a poor dejected cry of repining at her want of power to influence her husband, to make herself the successful rival of his profession, to wean him from the constant pursuit of science to the exclusion of all domestic bliss, and to render him her companion and her lover. But if Henrietta Prendergast were right, that must have been a mere fancy, which, compared to the wild despair that prompted the heart-broken shriek of "anywhere out of the world" at the last, and which, according to that authority, meant--anywhere for rest and peace and quiet, anywhere where I may stifle the love which I bear him, may be no longer a fetter and a clog to him, and might have to suffer the knowledge that though bound to me, he loves Madeleine Kilsyth.
 
He loves Madeleine Kilsyth! As the thought rose in his mind, he found himself audibly repeating the sentence. His dead wife thought that; and in that thought found life insupportable to her, and destroyed herself! His dead wife! Straightway his thoughts flew back through a series of years, and he saw himself first married,--young, earnest, and striving. Not in love with his wife--that he never had been, he reflected with something like self-excuse--not in love with Mabel, but actually proud of her. When he first commenced his connection, and earned the gratitude of the great railway contractor's wife at Clapham, and that great dame, who was the ruling star in her own circle, intimated her intention of calling on Mrs. Wilmot, Wilmot remembered how he had thanked his stars that while some of his fellow-students had married barmaids of London taverns, or awkward hoydens from their provincial pasture, he had had the good luck to espouse a girl than whom the great Mrs. Sleepers herself was not more thoroughly presentable, more perfectly well-mannered. He recollected the first interview at his little, modest, badly-furnished house, with the dingy maid-servant decorated with one of Mabel's cast-off gowns (not cast off until every scrap of bloom had been ruthlessly worn off it), and the arrival of the great lady in her banging, swinging barouche, with her tawdry ill-got-up footman, and her evident astonishment at the way in which everything was made the most of, and at the taste which characterised the rooms, and her open-mouthed wonder at Mabel herself, in her turned black-silk dress and her neat linen cuffs and collar, and her impossibility to patronise, and her declaration delivered to him the next day, that his wife was "the nicest little woman in the world, and a real lady!"
 
Out of the gloom of long-since vanished days came a thousand little reminiscences, each "garlanded with its peculiar flower," each touchingly remindful of something pleasant connected with the dead woman whom he had lost. Long dreary nights which he had passed in reading and working, and which she had spent in vaguely wondering what was to be the purport and result of all his labour. No sympathy! that had been his cry! Good God!--as though he had not been demented in fancying that a young woman could have had sympathy with his dry studies, his physiological experiments. No sympathy! what sympathy had he shown to her? The mere physical struggle in the race, the hope of winning, the dawning of success, had irradiated his life, had softened the stony path, and pushed aside the briers, and tempered the difficulties in his career; but how had she benefited? In sharing them? But had he permitted her to share them? had he ever made her a portion of himself? had he not laughed aside the notion of her entering into the vital affairs of his career, and told her that any assistance from her was an impossibility? That she was self-contained and unsympathetic, he had said to himself a thousand times. Now, for the first time, he asked himself who had made her so;--and the answer was anything but consoling to him in his then desolate frame of mind.
 
These thoughts were constantly present to him; he found it impossible to shake them off; in the few minutes' interval between the exit of one patient and the entrance of another, in his driving from house to house, his mind instantly gave up the case with which it had recently been occupied, and turned back to the dead woman. He would sit, apparently looking vacantly before him, but in reality trying to recall the looks, words, ways of his dead wife. He tried--O, how hard!--to recall one look of content, of happiness, of thorough trust and love; but he tried in vain. A general expression of quiet suffering, which had become calm through continuance, varied by an occasional glance of querulous impatience when he might have been betrayed into dilating on the importance of some case in which he happened to be engaged and the interest with which it filled him,--these were his only recollections of Mabel's looks. Nor did his remembrance of her words and ways afford him any more comfort. True she had never said, certainly had never said to him, that her life was anything but a happy one; but she had looked it often. Even he felt that now, reading her looks by the light of memory, and wondered that the truth had never struck him at the time. He remembered how he would look up off his work and see her, her hands lying listlessly in her lap, her eyes staring vacantly before, so entranced, so rapt in her own thoughts, that she would start violently when he spoke to her. She always had the same answer for his questions at those times. What was the matter with her? Nothing! What should be the matter with her?--What was she thinking of? Nothing, at least nothing that could possibly interest him. Did her presence there annoy him, because she would go away willingly if it did? And the voice in which this was said--the cold, hard, dry, unsympathising voice! Good God! if he had not been sufficiently mindful of her, if he had not bestowed such attention and affection as is due from a husband to his wife, surely there was some small excuse for him in the manner in which his clumsy approaches had been received!
 
At times he felt a wild inexplicable desire to have her back again with him, and fell into a long train of thought as to what he should do supposing all the events of the past three months were to turn out to have been a dream--as indeed he often fancied they would; and on his return he were to go up into the drawing-room, whither he had never penetrated since his return, and were to find Mabel sitting there, prim and orderly, among the prim and orderly furniture. Should he alter his method of life, and endeavour to make it more acceptable to her? How was it to be done? It would be impossible for him now to give up his confirmed ways; impossible for him to give up his reading and his work, and fritter away his evenings in taking his wife to the gaieties to which they were invited. Perkins might do that--did it, and found it answer; but the profession knew that Perkins was a charlatan, and he--What wild nonsense was he thinking of? It was done--it was over; he should never find his wife waiting for him again when he returned: she was dead; she had destroyed herself!
 
As this horrible thought burst upon him again with tenfold its original horror, he buried his face in his hands, and bowed his head upon the writing table in front of him in an agony of despair. He could bear it no longer; it was driving him mad. If he only knew--and yet he dared not inquire more closely; the presumptive evidence was horribly strong, was thoroughly sufficient to rob him of his peace of mind, of his clearness of intellect. Then the terrible consequences of the discovery, the awful duty which it imposed upon him, flashed upon his labouring consciousness. He dared not inquire more closely? No, not he. As a physician, he knew perfectly well what the result of any such inquiry would be. He knew perfectly well that in any other case, where he was merely professionally and not personally interested, his first idea for the solution of such doubts as then oppressed him, had they existed in anyone else, would have been to suggest the exhumation of the body, and its rigid examination. He knew perfectly well that, harbouring such doubts as were then racking and torturing his distracted mind, it was clearly his duty to insist on such steps being taken. He was no squeamish woman, no nervous man, to be alarmed at the sight of death's dread handiwork; that was familiar to him from constant experience, from old hospital custom, from his education and his studies. Should this dread idea of Mabel's self-destruction, now ever haunting him, ever present to his mind--should it cross the thoughts of anyone else, would not the necessity for exhumation be the first notion that would present itself? Suppose he were to suggest it? Suppose he were to profess himself dissatisfied with the accounts of Mabel's illness given him by Whittaker, and were to insist upon positive proof, professionally satisfactory to him, of his wife's disease? Of course he would make a deadly enemy of Whittaker; but that he thought but little of:............