His Other Wife: A Novel — page 357: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

SENTENCED AND RECLAIMED. 349 grave of her mother, be wrenched and bruised by the public disgrace of so scandalous a trial as this has been, even if your fortunes, and your lives, had been exacted to shield her from it? ‘* But I shame your innate manhood, and my own, by making a question of what any true man’s duty must be under such an alternative. It has been my misfortune to have sacrificed my natural indignation, and to have en- meshed myself with false appearances—all in vain. ‘‘By one of those unhappy chances which no degree of human prudence could have obviated, the girl over whom I assumed the guardianship has been drowned, in company with one of my wife's dearest relatives. In this untoward accident have I been made to pay the penalty of this ignominious arrest, imprisonment, and trial. ‘‘When you, gentlemen, shall have proclaimed me innocent, as I feel sure that you will, I shall still have to suffer tortures that not all the verdicts of all the juries of the earth can avert from my heart and my home. ‘‘Who or what can save me from the drooping, shame- laden head of my noble bride? Who or what can turn from my soul the bitter anguish of her woeful eyes? Who or what shall stand between my sight and the shadowy forms of her dead parents, whom I loved, and by whom I was beloved and trusted, when they shall haunt me with reproachful faces for their darling’s misery ? ‘‘Pardon me, my fellow-men and my judges, if I entreat you to excuse me from further discussion upon such Eomicbooks: (E(@)