Such feelings as
these, strong enough to chill her pity till Lady Mildmay wondered at a
wife so cold, were not deep or sincere enough to blind May Quisante's
eyes. Even without the doctor's story--which she had insisted on being
told in all its plainness--she thought that she would have known the
meaning of what had befallen her husband and herself, and have grasped at
once its two great features, the great certainty and the great
uncertainty; the certainty that his career was at an end, the uncertainty
as to how near his life was to its end. Such a position chimed in too
well with the bitter mood of Ashwood not to seem sent to crown it by a
malicious device of fate's. At the very moment when she least could love,
she was left no resource but love; at the moment when she would have
turned her eyes most away from him and most towards his deeds, the deeds
were taken away and he only was left; at the time when her hot anger
against him drove her into a cry for release, she received no promise of
release, or a promise deferred beyond an indefinitely stretching period
of a worse imprisonment.
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