engagement to Maria Lee, of which, be it remembered, his wife was
totally ignorant, and which was in itself a sufficiently awkward
affair for a married man to have on his hands. Then there was the
paramount need of keeping his marriage with Hilda as secret as the
dead, to say nothing of the necessity of his living, for the most
part, away from his wife. Indeed, his only consolation was that he had
plenty of money on which to support her, inasmuch as his father had,
from the date of his leaving Oxford, made him an allowance of one
thousand a year.

Hilda had begun to discover that she was not without her troubles. For
one thing, her husband's fits of moodiness and fretful anxiety
troubled her, and led her, possessed as she was with a more than
ordinary share of womanly shrewdness, to suspect that he was hiding
something from her. But what chiefly vexed her proud nature was the
necessity of concealment, and all its attendant petty falsehoods and
subterfuges. It was not pleasant for Hilda Caresfoot to have to pass
as Mrs. Roberts, and to be careful not to show herself in public
places in the daytime, where there was a possibility of her being seen
by any one who might recognize in her striking figure the lady who had
lived with Miss Lee in Marlshire. It was not pleasant to her to be
obliged to reply to Maria Lee's affectionate letters, full as they
were of entreaty for her return, by epistles that had to be forwarded
to a country town in a remote district of Germany to be posted, and
which were in themselves full of lies that, however white they might
have seemed under all the circumstances, she felt in her conscience to
be very black indeed. In short, there was in their union none of that
sense of finality and of security that is, under ordinary
circumstances, the distinguishing mark of marriage in this country; it
partook rather of the nature of an illicit connection.