She sat down again on the sofa with eyes that glittered and cheeks suffused with an angry red.

"I am no worse than another woman!" she thought.

"Another woman might have married him for his money." The next moment the miserable insufficiency of her own excuse for deceiving him showed its hollowness, self-exposed.

She covered her face with her hands, and found refuge--where she had often found refuge before--in the helpless resignation of despair.

"Oh, that I had died before I entered this house! Oh, that I could die and have done with it at this moment!" So the struggle had ended with her hundreds of times already.