But, it is hard--nay, almost impossible--for one like Madeline, reared as she was in so warm an atmosphere of love, to fall back upon and find a sustaining power, in such a philosophy.

Her spirit first must droop.

There must be a passing through the fire, with painful purification.

Alas! How many perish in the ordeal!--How many gentle, loving ones, unequally mated, die, daily, around us; moving on to the grave, so far as the world knows, by the way of some fatal bodily ailment; yet, in truth, failing by a heart-sickness that has dried up the fountains of life.
And so it was with the wife of Edward Leslie.

Greatly her husband wondered at the shadows which fell, more and more heavily, on Madeline--wondered as time wore on, at the paleness of her cheeks--the sadness which, often, she could not repress when he was by; the variableness of her spirits--all tending to destroy the balance of her nervous system, and, finally, ending in confirmed ill-health, that demanded, imperiously, the diversion of his thoughts from business and worldly schemes to the means of prolonging her life.
Alas! What a sad picture to look upon, would it be, were we to sketch, even in outline, the passing events of the ten years that preceded this conviction on the part of Mr.Leslie.To Madeline, his cold, hard, impatient, and, too frequently, cruel re-actions upon what he thought her unreasonable, captious, dissatisfied states of mind, having no ground but in her imagination, were heavy heart-strokes--or, as a discordant hand dashed among her life-chords, putting them forever out of tune.