I Forbid the Banns! — page 389: what you’re looking at

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

ON PRIVATE INQUIRY. 379 been offered to her, she had been met by him with coldness and suspicion. And then, the next night, she had over- heard him speak those words which came from the bitter- ness of his heart: “ She is not my wife.” He knew that those words represented the anguish that he had been suffering for days; but he knewthat they were not the less cruel when overheard by Bertha. How could he explain them ? He sprang to his feet. ‘IT shall not make any attempt to explain,” he cried. ‘If she has not already found out, or if she will not have found out by the time we meet again, that the sort of life we were leading—the form of union which I was weak enough to yield to—is founded on an error and cannot be maintained as society is at present constituted—if she has not learned that it develops one’s worst and not one’s best nature, it is better that we should never meet again.”’ He paced the room for hours—until all the objects in the room had become luminous in the morning light. The possibility of never meeting her again was too terrible to permit of his having a moment of sleep, he knew. But surely she had come to perceive the truth of her position, he thought. Surely that gross insult to which she had been subjected must have convinced her that the theories of life upon which she had acted and induced him to act did not possess the elements of stability. Finally he recalled what Mr. Hardy had said regarding the most important influence to which Bertha could be subjected, in order to induce her toreturntoher home. The possibility to which Mr. Hardy had alluded caused all Julian’s tender feelings to be aroused. He fell on his knees and cried aloud ina passion of tears, “O God! O God! give her back to me—give her back to me!” That is the prayer of the widower beside the grave of the woman whose life he has made such a hell that an eternity CORNICLOOOKS (€(0)