It was half an hour from the time Mr. Dexter left his wife, when he returned. His hand upon the lock aroused her from the waking dream into which she had fallen. As she arose, her manner began to change, and, ere she had reached the door, the quicker flowing blood was restoring the color to her cheeks. She had passed through a long and severe struggle; and woman's virtue, aided by woman's pride and will, had conquered.
Mrs. Dexter spoke to her husband cheerfully as he came in, and met his steady, searching look without a sign of confusion. He was at fault. Yet not deceived.
"Are you better?" he asked.
"Much better," she replied; and turning from him, went on with the arrangement of her toilet, which had been suspended from the period of her husband's absence, until his return. Mr. Dexter passed into their private parlor, adjoining the bedroom, and remained there until his wife had finished dressing.
"Shall we go down?" he inquired, as she came in looking so beautiful in his eyes that the very sight of her surpassing loveliness gave him pain. The Fiend was in his heart.
"Not now," she replied "I am still fatigued with the day's travel, and had rather not see company at present."
She glanced from the window.
"What a sublimity there is in the ocean!" she said, with an unusual degree of interest in her manner, when speaking to her husband. "I can never become so familiar with its grandeur and vastness, as to look upon its face without emotion. You remember Byron's magnificent apostrophe?—
"'Roll on, thou deep and dark blue ocean, roll.'"
And she repeated several of the stanzas from "Childe Harold," with an effect that stirred her husband's feelings more profoundly than they had ever been stirred by nature and poetry before.