weak, and certainly not quite well; it was all
owing to her sleeplessness. How could any one
be well who did not get oblivion in the darkness?
This would pass, and time would bring
rest and peace. Wholly possessed by her love
for her husband, she was not conscious of the
change in her manner towards him. She did not
know that the strange repulsion she sometimes
felt, and which she told herself was merely
physical nervousness, had so told upon her, that she
was absent and distant with him for the most
part, and in the occasional spasmodic bursts of
love which she yielded to showed such haunting
and harrowing grief as sometimes nearly
maddened him with anger, with disgust, with ennui
—not with repentance, not with compassion—
maddened him, not for her sake, but for his own.

The transition, effected by the aid of his
intense selfishness, from his former state of feeling
towards Harriet, to one which required
only the intervention of any active cause to
become hatred, was not a difficult matter to a
man like Routh. Having lost all her former
charm, and much of her previous usefulness,
she soon became to him a disagreeable reminder.
Something more than that — the
mental superiority of the woman, which had
never before incommoded him, now became
positively hateful to him. It carried with it, now
that it was no longer his mainstay, a power
which was humiliating, because it was fear-
inspiring. Routh was afraid of his wife, and
knew that he was afraid of her, when he had
ceased to love her, after he had begun to
dislike her; so much afraid of her that he kept up
appearances to an extent, and for a duration of
time, inexpressibly irksome to a man so callous,
so egotistical, so entirely devoid of any sentiment
or capacity of gratitude.

Such was the position of affairs when George
Dallas and Mr. Felton left London to join Mr.
and Mrs. Carruthers at Homburg. From the
time of his arrival, and even when he had yielded
to the clever arguments which had been adduced
to urge him to silence, there was a sense of
insecurity, a foreboding in Routh's mind; not a
trace of the sentimental superstitious terror
with which imaginary criminals are invested
after the fact, but with the reasonable fear of
a shrewd man, in a tremendously dangerous
and difficult position, who knows he has made
a false move, and looks, with moody perplexity,
for the consequences, sooner or later.

" He must have come to England, at all
events, Stewart," Harriet said to her
husband, when he cursed his own imprudence for
the twentieth time; " he must have come home
to see his uncle. Mr. Felton would have been
directed here to us by the old woman at
Poynings, and we must have given his address.
Remember, his uncle arrived in England the
same day he did."

I should have sent him to George, not
brought George to him," said Routh. " And
there's that uncle of his, Felton; he is no friend
of ours, Harriet; he does not like us."

" I am quite aware of that," she answered ;
"civil as he is, he is very honest, and has never
pretended to be our friend. If he is George's
friend, and George has told him anything about
his life since he has known us, I think we could
hardly expect him to like us."

Her husband gave her one of his darkest
looks, but she did not remark it. Many things
passed now without attracting her notice; even
her husband's looks, and sometimes his words,
which were occasionally as bitter as he dared to
make them.

He was possessed with a notion that he must,
for a time at least, keep a watch upon George
Dallas; not near, indeed, nor apparently close,
but constant, and as complete as the
maintenance of Harriet's influence with him made
possible. For himself, he felt his own influence
was gone, and he was far too wise to attempt to
catch at it, as it vanished, or to ignore its
absence. He acquiesced in the tacit estrangement;
he was never in the way, but he never lost
sight of George ; he always knew what he was
doing, and had early information of his movements,
and with tolerable accuracy, considering
that the spy whose services he employed was
quite an amateur and novice.

This spy was Mr. James Swain, who took to
the duties of his new line of business with
vigorous zeal, and who seemed to derive a grim
kind of amusement from their discharge.
Stewart Routh had arrived with certainty at
the conclusion that the young man had adhered
to the promised silence up to the time of his
leaving England with his uncle, and he felt
assured that Mr. Felton was in entire ignorance
of the circumstances which had had
such terrible results for Mrs. Carruthers. It
was really important to him to have George
Dallas watched, and, in setting Jim Swain to
watch him, he was inspired by darkly sinister
motives, in view of certain remote contingencies
—motives which had suggested themselves
to him shortly after George's unhesitating
recognition of the boy who had taken Routh's
note to Deane, on the last day of the unhappy
man's life, had solved the difficulty which had
long puzzled him. Only second in importance
to his keeping George Dallas in view was his
not losing sight of the boy; and all this time it
never occurred to Routh, as among the remote
possibilities of things, that Mr. Jim Swain was
quite as determined to keep an eye on him.

Harriet had acquiesced in her husband's
proposal that they should go to Homburg readily.
It happened that she was rather more cheerful
than usual on the day he made it, more like,
though, still terribly unlike, her former self.
She was in one of those intervals in which the
tortured prisoner stoops at the stake, during a
temporary suspension of the inventive industry
of his executioner. The fire smouldered for a
ittle, the pincers cooled. She was in the
lands of inflexible tormentors, and who could
tell what device of pain might attend the
rousing from the brief torpor? Nature must
have its periods of rest for the mind, be