acter; he stands on his rights. But I, poor unfortunate, am sunk lower and more irreclaimably than ever toward ruin.' You may surmise what awaits you and your son,'" she repeated to herself, remembering a sentence in his letter. "It is a threat that he means to rob me of my son, and doubtless their wretched laws allow it. But, do I not see why he said that? He has no belief in my love for my son; or else he is deriding,—as he always does, in his sarcastic manner,—is deriding this feeling of mine, for he knows that I will not abandon my son—I cannot abandon him; that without my son, life would be unsupportable, even with him whom I love; and that to abandon my son, and leave him, I should fall like the worst of women. This he knows, and knows that I should never have the power to do so.
"'Our lives must remain unchanged,'" she continued, remembering another sentence in the letter. "This life was a torture before; but of late it has grown worse than ever. What will it be now? And he knows all this,—knows that I cannot repent because I breathe, because I love; he knows that nothing except falsehood and deceit can result from this: but he must needs prolong my torture. I know him, and I know that he swims in perjury like a fish in water. But no; I will not give him this pleasure. I will break this network of lies in which he wants to enwrap me. Come what may, anything is better than lies and deception.
"But how? Bozhe moï! Bozhe moï! Was there ever woman so unhappy as I?" ....
"No, I will break it! I will break it!" she cried, springing to her feet and striving to keep back the tears. And she went to her writing-table to begin another letter to him. But in the lowest depths of her soul she felt that she had not the power to break the network of circumstances,—that she had not the power to escape from the situation in which she was placed, false and dishonorable though it was.
She sat down at the table; but, instead of writing, she folded her arms on the table, and bowed her head on them, and began to weep like a child, with heaving
