of that ill-assorted union, in which you have accepted the sufferer's
part. Though your conduct has been unfailingly heroical, though your
firmness has never once given way in the exercise of your painful
duties, perhaps, in the silence of lonely nights, the heart that at
this moment is beating so wildly in your breast, may, from time to
time, have rebelled. Your husband's superiority was in itself your
worst torment. If he had been less noble, less single-minded, you
might have deserted him; but his virtues upheld yours; you wondered,
perhaps, whether his heroism or your own would be the first to give
way.

"You clung to your really magnanimous task as Paolo clung to his
chimera. If you had had nothing but a devotion to duty to guide and
sustain you, triumph might have seemed easier; you would only have had
to crush your heart, and transfer your life into the world of
abstractions; religion would have absorbed all else, and you would
have lived for an idea, like those saintly women who kill all the
instincts of nature at the foot of the altar. But the all-pervading
charm of Paolo, the loftiness of his mind, his rare and touching
proofs of tenderness, constantly drag you down from that ideal realm
where virtue would fain maintain you; they perennially revive in you
the energies you have exhausted in contending with the phantom of
love. You never suspected this! The faintest glimmer of hope led you
on in pursuit of the sweet vision.

"At last the disappointments of many years have undermined your
patience,--an angel would have lost it long since,--and now the
apparition so long pursued is no more than a shade without substance.
Madness that is so nearly allied to genius can know no cure in this
world. When this thought first struck you, you looked back on your