Her heart got deadly sick; an extraordinary weakness came over her; she became alarmed, frightened, distressed; her knees tottered under her, and she felt on reaching the hall-door as if she were about to faint.

Her imagination became disturbed; a heavy, depressing gloom descended upon her, and darkened her flexible and unresisting spirit, as if it were the forebodings of some terrible calamity.
The diabolical wretch who had just left her took care to perform her base and heartless task with double effect.

It was not merely the information she had communicated concerning Woodward that affected her so deeply, although she felt, as it were, in the Inmost recesses of her soul, that it was true, but that which went at the moment with greater agony to her heart was the allusion to Charles Lindsay, and the corroboration it afforded to the truth of the charge which Woodward had brought, with so much apparent reluctance, against him--the charge of having neglected and abandoned her for another, and that other a person of low birth, who, by relinquishing her virtue, had contrived to gain such an artful and selfish ascendancy over him.

How could she doubt it?
Here was a woman ignorant of the communication Woodward had made to her,--ignorant of the vows that had passed between them,--who had heard of his falsehood and profligacy, and who never would have alluded to them had she not been questioned.

So far, then, Woodward, she felt, stood without blame with respect to his brother.