There was such a certainty of it lying behind Phebe's sorrowful eyes as she whispered "I know it," that Felicita had not cared to ask how she knew it.

She did not trouble herself with details.

The one fact was there: her husband had absconded.

A dreamy panorama of their past life flitted across her brain--his passionate love for her, which had never cooled, though it had failed to meet with a response from her; his insatiable desire to make her life more full of pomp and luxury and display than that of her cousins at Riversdale; his constant thraldom to her, which had ministered only to her pride and coldness.

His queen he had called her.
It was all over now.