Had anything changed? Was his wife anything which he did not know
her to be three months ago? Certainly not. He could not accuse her
of passing herself off upon him with false pretences. What she had
always represented herself to be she was now. There she stood
precisely as she stood twelve months ago, when he asked her to become
his wife, and he thought when she said "yes" that no man was more
blessed than he. It was, he feared, true he did not love her, nor
she him; but why could not they have found that out before? What a
cruel destiny was this which drew a veil before his eyes and led him
blindfold over the precipice! He at first thought, when his joy
began to ebb in February or March, that it would rise again, and that
he would see matters in a different light; but the spring was here,
and the tide had not turned. It never would turn now, and he became
at last aware of the sad truth--the saddest a man can know--that he
had missed the great delight of existence. His chance had come, and
had gone. Henceforth all that was said and sung about love and home
would find no echo in him. He was paralysed, dead in half of his
soul, and would have to exist with the other half as well he could.
He had done no wrong: he had done his best; he had not sold himself
to the flesh or the devil, and, Calvinist as he was, he was tempted
at times to question the justice of such a punishment. If he put his
finger in the fire and got burnt, he was able to bow to the wisdom
which taught him in that plain way that he was not to put his finger
in the fire. But wherein lay the beneficence of visiting a simple
mistake--one which he could not avoid--with a curse worse than the
Jewish curse of excommunication--"the anathema wherewith Joshua
cursed Jericho; the curse which Elisha laid upon the children; all
the curses which are written in the law. Cursed be he by day, and
cursed be he by night: cursed be he in sleeping, and cursed be he in
waking: cursed in going out, and cursed in coming in." Neither the