But she had chosen to join herself to a man who had treated her with a cruelty exceeding all that his imagination could have conceived.

"It is a mercy that he has gone," said he at last.
"It is a mercy for both.

Perhaps you can understand now something of my married life.

And through it all I had but one friend--if I may call him a friend who had come to terms with my husband, and who was to have been his agent in destroying me.

But when this man understood from me that I was not what he had been taught to think me--which my husband told him I was--he relented." "May I ask what was that man's name ?" "His name is Pateroff.