However passionately she repudiated it, it
still cried mockingly, "I am here!" It asked if her prayers for her
husband's life were sincere, if her care for him were more than a due
paid to decency, if the doom were in truth a thing she dreaded, and not a
deliverance which convention alone forbade her openly to desire. Plainly,
plainly--did she wish the doom to fall, did she wish him dead, was the
rebellion that threatened death the course which the secret craving of
her heart urged him to take? To do everything for him was not enough, if
the doubt still lurked that her heart was not in the doing. For now she
could no more ask coolly what she wished; the thing had come too near; it
was odious to have a thought except of saving him by all means and at
every cost; it was intolerable not to know at least that no part of the
impulse which drove him to his rebellion lay at her door, not to feel at
least that she had nothing but dread and horror for the threatened doom.
She had no love for him; it came home to her now with a strange new sense
of self-condemnation; she had married him for her own pleasure, because
he interested her and made life seem dull without him.
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