Nothing occurred in the slightest degree to mar her felicity.

Rochester seemed only to live for her--to think only of her.

At the end of this time, some indifference began to manifest itself in his deportment to her, and he evinced a disposition to return to the court and to its pleasures.
"I thought you had for ever abandoned them, my dear lord," said Amabel, reproachfully.
"For awhile I have," he replied, carelessly.
"You must leave me, if you return to them," she rejoined.
"If I must, I must," said the earl.
"You cannot mean this, my lord," she cried, bursting into tears.

"You cannot be so changed." "I have never changed since you first knew me," replied Rochester.
"Impossible!" she cried, in a tone of anguish; "you have not the faults--the vices, you once had." "I know not what you call faults and vices, madam," replied the earl sharply, "but I have the same qualities as heretofore.
"Am I to understand, then," cried Amabel, a fearful suspicion of the truth breaking upon her, "that you never sincerely repented your former actions ?" "You are to understand it," replied Rochester.
"And you deceived me when you affirmed the contrary ?" "I deceived you," he replied.
"I begin to suspect," she cried, with a look of horror and doubt, "that the attack of the plague was feigned." "You are not far wide of the truth," was the reply.
"And our marriage ?" she cried--"our marriage?
Was that feigned likewise ?" "It was," replied Rochester, calmly.
Amabel looked at him fixedly for a few minutes, as if she could not credit his assertion, and then receiving no contradiction, uttered a wild scream, and rushed out of the room.

Rochester followed, and saw her dart with lightning swiftness across the court-yard.