do? What has he left undone you had better ask. He has broken every
command of the decalogue--every law human and divine. He is dead to us
all--his sister included, and has been these many years. Ethel, can I
believe--"

"I have told you, Sir Victor. You will believe as you please," his
wife answers, a little sullenly, turning away from him.

She understands him. His very jealousy and anger are born of his
passionate love for her. To grieve her is torture to him, yet he
grieves her often.

For a tradesman's daughter to marry a baronet may be but one remove
from paradise; still it is a remove. And the serpent in Lady Catheron's
Eden is the ugliest and most vicious of all serpents--jealousy. He has
never shown his green eyes and obnoxious claws so palpably before, and
as Sir Victor looks at her bending over her baby, his fierce paroxysm
of jealousy gives way to a fierce paroxysm of love.

"Oh, Ethel, forgive me!" he says; "I did not mean to wound you, but
the thought of that man--faugh! But I am a fool to be jealous of you,
my white lily. Kiss me--forgive me--we'll throw this snake in the
grass out of the window and forget it. Only--I had rather you had told
me."

He tears up the wretched little mischief-making picture, and flings it
out of the window with a look of disgust. Then they "kiss and make up,"
but the stab has been given, and will rankle. The folly of her past is
doing its work, as all our follies past and present are pretty sure to
do.