and can you ask the result?" He was a French writer; but Mrs. Welford had in her temper much of the French woman. A suffering patient, young, handsome, well versed in the arts of intrigue, contrasted with a gloomy husband whom she had never comprehended, long feared, and had lately doubted if she disliked;—ah! a much weaker contrast has made many a much better woman food for the lawyers! Mrs. Welford eloped; but she felt a revived tenderness for her husband on the very morning that she did so. She carried away with her his letters of love as well as her own, which when they first married she had, in an hour of fondness, collected together—then an inestimable hoard!—and never did her new lover receive from her beautiful lips half so passionate a kiss as she left on the cheek of her infant. For some months she enjoyed with her paramour all for which she had sighed in her home. The one for whom she had forsaken her legitimate ties, was a person so habitually cheerful, courteous, and what is ordinarily termed good-natured, (though he had in him as much of the essence of selfishness as any nobleman can
