A Struggle for a Ring — page 192: what you’re looking at

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

188 AT SCHOOL. Yet, beneath this carelessness—though after a time he forgot even the outlines of his young wife’s face, though the sound of her voice faded from him and left him, though he had almost ceased to remember how it was and why he had married her—there was in his mind an under- current of bitterness, a sense cf bondage, a keen pain. that deepened as the days wore on, and the face of Ethel Pier- pont grew every day dearer and dearer to him. A sense of intolerable bondage irritated him, although he thought so little of his wife that he quite ceased to connect this thought with her. He tried to drown it, to stifle it as much as he could, but it returned again and again—it irritated him, it took the brightness from his heart, yet he was young and sanguine; five years seemed a long time; some miracle or other must happen in that time. It was not his freedom to which he looked forward with this hope, the thought, the wish, the desire, the hope that Ailie should die was as remote from his mind as anything could be; it-was a vain, intangible kind of something that would give him Lady Ethel—that should undo this mar- riage that he had so little considered, So little thought of. As time wore on the fact of his marriage faded more and more from his mind. But for the realities of the - incomes he had guaranteed, all would have seemed to him a dream. It is not so wonderful when one remembers that he saw so little of his wife, that he had only married her to save her from the consequences of her own folly _and his imprudence in taking her to the regatta. More than once he said to himself that when he had time he would go to England and see if it could not possi- — bly be undone: After all it seemed half absurd that-a few words, such as he had uttered, should bind him for life, when neither heart, head, nor will went with it. (e(0) comicbooks ¢ mM