 the mailed hand of Pride itself, on weaker pride, disarmed and thrown
down.
    Such wounds were his. He felt them sharply, in the solitude of his old
rooms; whither he now began often to retire again, and pass long solitary hours.
It seemed his fate to be ever proud and powerful; ever humbled and powerless
where he would be most strong. Who seemed fated to work out that doom?
    Who? Who was it who could win his wife as she had won his boy? Who was it
who had shown him that new victory, as he sat in the dark corner? Who was it
whose least word did what his utmost means could not? Who was it who, unaided by
his love, regard or notice, thrived and grew beautiful when those so aided died?
Who could it be, but the same child at whom he had often glanced uneasily in her
motherless infancy, with a kind of dread, lest he might come to hate her; and of
whom his foreboding was fulfilled, for he DID hate her in his heart?
    Yes, and he would have it hatred, and he made it hatred, though some
sparkles of the light in which she had appeared before him on the memorable
night of his return home with his Bride, occasionally hung about her still. He
knew now that she was beautiful; he did not dispute that she was graceful and
winning, and that in the bright dawn of her womanhood she had come upon him, a
surprise. But he turned even this against her. In his sullen and unwholesome
brooding, the unhappy man, with a dull perception of his alienation from all
hearts, and a vague yearning for what he had all his life repelled, made a
distorted picture of his rights and wrongs, and justified himself with it
against her. The worthier she promised to be of him, the greater claim he was
disposed to ante-date upon her duty and submission. When had she ever shown him
duty and submission? Did she grace his life - or Edith's? Had her attractions
been manifested first to him - or Edith? Why, he and she had never been, from
her birth, like father and child! They had always been estranged. She had
crossed him every way and everywhere. She was leagued against him now. Her very
beauty softened natures that were obdurate to him, and insulted him with an
unnatural triumph.
    It may have been that in all this there were mutterings of an awakened
feeling in his breast, however selfishly aroused by his position of
disadvantage, in comparison with what she
