Mrs. Lee leaned back in her chair, and her fine eyes filled with the brightest drops that ever sprung from a loving heart.
"I ought to be more grateful," she murmured, sweetly; "the blessed Lord has been so good to me. Oh! if all this should lead me to think less of Him, and more—sinfully more of my—my family."
"But this will never be; your nature is too well regulated."
"Ah! but Mrs. Dennison, you cannot imagine—you can form no idea how I have worshipped—how I do worship my husband. From the first hour I saw him to this, when we have sunk into mid-life together, it has been one struggle to keep him from overshadowing the love of God in this heart."
A heavenly expression came over that pale face, as the noble woman spoke words that the reticence of her nature had kept back even from me, her tried friend up to that hour; and now they were poured forth to the greedy ear of that woman like an overflow of wine upon the sandvile sand, which a thousand repulsive things had trodden over.
I could scarcely keep from crying out under the pressure of disgust that seized upon me when the creature lifted her eyes to the heaven of that face. In my whole life I had never seen an expression like that—so quick, so unutterably vicious. That instant some evil idea was born in the woman's brain; I saw it clearly, as if the map of her bad heart had been laid out before me. This idea, gendered from the loving goodness of Mrs. Lee's speech, broke into her eyes as the serpent bursts the mother-egg when hot sunshine is upon it.
This expression revelled in her eyes a moment, and then crept away as if a reptile had left her eyes and coiled itself in the depths of her soul. I could detect a tone of exultation in her voice when she spoke again; but it was low still, and vibrated with strange fascination on the ear.
"And you love him so much?"
"I thought in my youth that it was impossible to love him better—that it was wrong to love any human being so much. Night and morning I prayed God to keep me clear of man-worship; but how can one pray against love to a God who is love itself? When I saw how completely my whole being gave itself to my husband, how impossible it was to weaken one throb of the joy which filled me at his approach, I gave up the struggle, and soon rendered double gratitude to the Divine Being for giving him to me. It was all I could do."
"And did he love you so much?"