With the unexpected return of George Dallas to London from Amsterdam, an occurrence against which so much precaution had been taken, and which had appeared to be so very improbable, a sense of discouragement and alarm had stolen over Stewart Routh. In the coarse bold sense of the term, he was a self-reliant man. He had no faith in anything higher or holier than luck and pluck; but, in those mundane gods, his faith was steadfast, and had been hitherto justified. On the whole, for an outcast (as he had been for some time, that time, too, so important in a man's life) he had not done badly; he had schemed successfully, and cunning and crime had availed him. He was a callous man by nature, of a base disposition; and, under any circumstances, would have been cool-headed and dogged. In the circumstances in which he found himself, his dogged cool-headedness was peculiarly useful and valuable. He had relied upon them without any doubt or misgiving until the day on which he was convinced by George Dallas's appearance on the stage, which he believed him to have abandoned for an indefinite time, that he had made a miscalculation. Then a slow cold fear began to creep over him. Had his luck--what marvellous luck it had been!--turned? Believers in such a creed as his are mostly superstitious fanatics. He had felt some such dread; then, from the moment when Harriet--Harriet, who should have seen that he had blundered: confound the woman, was she losing her head?--had told him, in her smooth encouraging way, that this new difficulty should be surmounted as the others had been. Not the smallest touch of repentance, not the slightest shadow of remorse, fell upon him with the stirring of this fact--only a hard, contemptuous anger against himself and Harriet, and a bitter scornful hatred for the young man who had been his tool for so long, and might now, in a moment, be turned into the agent of his punishment. When George Dallas left Harriet after the discussion which had terminated in his promise not to move in the matter of the identification of Deane, Stewart Routh, though he bore himself with calmness in his talk with his wife, had invariably writhed and raged under the galling sense of the first check he had received. If he could have done it safely, if the deed would not have been more fatal than the conjuncture he feared, he would have murdered Dallas readily; and he told himself so. He had none of the poetry, none of the drama of crime about him. He was not a man to kill one human being because it suited his purpose to do so, and then to hesitate about killing another, if a still more powerful preventive presented itself; he was incapable of the mixture of base and cruel motives with the kind of sentimental heroics, with which the popular imagination endows criminals of the educated classes. He had all the cynicism of such individuals, cynicism which is their strongest, characteristic; but he had nothing even mock heroic in his composition. His hatred of George was mixed with the bitterest contempt. When he found the young man amenable beyond his expectations; when he found him unshaken in the convictions with which Harriet had contrived to inspire him and hardly requiring to be supported by his own arguments, his reassurance was inferior to his scorn.  
"The fool, the wretched, contemptible idiot!" Routh said, as he looked round his dressing-room that night, and noted one by one the signs which would have betokened to a practised eye preparations for an abrupt departure, "it is hardly worth while to deceive him, and to rule such a creature. He was full of suspicion of me before he went away, and the first fruits of that pretty and affecting conversation of his, under the influence of his mother and the territorial decencies of Poynings, was what he flattered himself was a resolution to pay me off, and be free of me. He yields to my letter without the slightest difficulty, and comes here the moment he returns. He believes in Harriet as implicitly as ever; and if he is not as fond of me as he was, he is quite as obedient." The cynical nature of the man showed itself in the impatient weariness with which he thought of his success, and in the levity with which he dismissed, or at least tried to dismiss, the subject from his mind. There was, however, one insuperable obstacle to his getting rid of it--his wife.
 
Harriet had miscalculated her strength; not the strength of her intellect, but that of her nerves, and the strain had told upon them. She still loved her husband with a desperate kind of love; but all its peace, all its strength, all its frankness--and even in the evil life they had always led it had possessed these qualities--had vanished. She loved him now with all the old intensity of passion, but with an element of fierceness added to it, with a horrid craving and fear, sometimes with a sudden repulsion, which she rebelled against as physical cowardice, causing her to shrink from him in the darkness, and to shut her ears from the sound of his breathing in his sleep. And then she would upbraid herself fiercely, and ask herself if she, who had given him all her life and being, who had renounced for him--though she denied to herself that such renunciation was any sacrifice, for did she not love him, as happy women, the caressed of society, do not know how to love--home, name, kindred, and God, could possibly shrink from him now? She had not played any pretty little game of self-deception; she had not persuaded herself that he was other than he really was; she did not care, she loved him, just as he was, no better and no worse. She lived for him, she believed in, she desired, she asked no other life; and if a terrible anguish had come into that life latterly, that was her share of it, her fair share. It was not easy, for she was a woman and weak; her nerves would thrill sometimes, and phantoms swarm about her; sleeplessness would wear her down, and a spell be set upon her lips, under which they strove vainly to curve with their old smile, and to utter their old words of endearment and protestation; for she scorned and hated herself for such weakness, and could have torn her rebellious flesh with rage, that sometimes it would creep and turn cold when he touched her, or even when he only spoke. She fought this false and dastardly weakness, as she called it, with steady bravery, and with the resolve to conquer, which is always half a moral battle; but she did not conquer it, she only quelled it for a little while. It returned on occasions, and then it tortured and appalled her even more than when the foe had been always in position.
 
All such conflicts of feeling had the effect of narrowing the sphere of her life, of concentrating her whole attention on, and intensifying her absorption in, her husband. A lassitude which her own good sense told her was dangerous began to take possession of her. They were better off now--she did not rightly know how, or how much, for she had gradually lapsed from her previous customary active overseeing of Routh's affairs, and had been content to take money as he gave it, and expend it as he desired, skilfully and economically, but with an entire indifference, very different from the cheerful, sunny household thriftiness which had formerly been so marked a feature in their Bohemian life, and had testified, perhaps more strongly than any other of its characteristics, to the utter deadness of the woman's conscience. His comforts were as scrupulously looked after as ever, and far more liberally provided for; but the tasteful care for her home, the indescribable something which had invested their life with the charm of a refinement contrasting strangely with its real degradation, had vanished. Harriet's manner was changed--changed to a quietude unnatural to her, and peculiarly unpleasant to Routh, who had had a scientific appreciation of the charm of steady, business-like, calm judgment and decision brought to bear on business matters; but discarded, at a moment's notice, for sparkling liveliness and a power of enjoyment which never passed the bounds of refinement in its demonstrativeness. "Eat, drink, and be merry" had been their rule of life in time that seemed strangely old to them both; and if the woman alone had sometimes remarked that the precept had a corollary, she did not care much about it. "To-morrow ye die" was an assurance which carried little terror to one absolutely without belief in a future life, and who, in this, had realized her sole desire, and lived every hour in the fulness of its realization. Stewart Routh had never had the capacity, either of heart or of intellect, to comprehend his wife thoroughly; but he had loved her as much as he was capable of loving any one, in his own way, and the strength and duration of the feeling had been much increased by their perfect comradeship. His best aid in business, his shrewd, wise counsellor in difficulty, his good comrade in pleasure, his sole confidant--it must be remembered that there was no craving for respect on the one side, no possibility of rendering it, no power of missing it, on the other--and the most cherished wife of the most respectable and worthy member of society might have compared her position with that of Harriet with considerable disadvantage on many points.
 
Things were, however, changed of late, and Harriet had begun to feel, with something of the awfully helpless, feeble foreboding with which the victims of conscious madness foresee the approach of the foe, that there was some power, whose origin she did not know, whose nature she could not discern, undermining her, and conquering her unawares. Was it bodily illness? She had always had unbroken health, and was slow to detect any approach of disease. She did not think it could be that, and conscience, remorse, the presence, the truth, of the supernatural components of human life, she disbelieved in; therefore she refused to take the possibility of their existence and their influence into consideration. She was no longer young, and she had suffered--yes, she had certainly suffered a very great deal; no one could love as she loved and not suffer, that was all. Time would do everything for her; things were going well; all risk was at an end, with the procuring of George's promise and the quieting of George's scruples (how feeble a nature his was, she thought, but without the acrid scorn a similar reflection had aroused in her husband's mind); and every week of time gained without the revival of any inquisition, was a century of presumptive safety. Yes, now she was very weak, and certainly not quite well; it was all owing to her sleeplessness. How could any one be well who did not get oblivion in the darkness? This would pass, and time would bring rest and peace. Wholly possessed by her love for her husband, she was not conscious of the change in her manner towards him. She did not know that the strange repulsion she sometimes felt, and which she told herself was merely physical nervousness, had so told upon her, that she was absent and distant with him for the most part, and in the occasional spasmodic bursts of love which she yielded to showed such haunting and harrowing grief as sometimes nearly maddened him with anger, with disgust, with ennui--not with repentance, not with compassion--maddened him, not for her sake, but for his own.
 
The transition, effected by the aid of his intense selfishness, from his former state of feeling towards Harriet, to one which required only the intervention of any active cause to become hatred, was not a difficult matter to a man like Routh. Having lost all her former charm, and much of her previous usefulness, she soon became to him a disagreeable reminder. Something more than that--the mental superiority of the woman, which had never before incommoded him, now became positively hateful to him. It carried with it, now that it was no longer his mainstay, a power which was humiliating, because it was fear-inspiring. Routh was afraid of his wife, and knew that he was afraid of her, when he had ceased to love her, after he had begun to dislike her; so much afraid of her that he kept up appearances to an extent, and for a duration of time, inexpressibly irksome to a man so callous, so egotistical, so entirely devoid of any sentiment or capacity of gratitude.
 
Such was the position of affairs when George Dallas and Mr. Felton left London to join Mr. and Mrs. Carruthers at Homburg. From the time of his arrival, and even when he had yielded to the clever arguments which had been adduced to urge him to silence, there was a sense of insecurity, foreboding in Routh's mind; not a trace of the sentimental superstitious terror with which imaginary criminals are invested after the fact, but with the reasonable fear of a shrewd man, in a tremendously dangerous and difficult position, who knows he has made a false move, and looks, with moody perplexity, for the consequences sooner or later.
 
"He must have come to England, at all events, Stewart," Harriet said to her husband, when he cursed his own imprudence for the twentieth time; "he must have come home to see his uncle. Mr. Felton would have been directed here to us by the old woman at Poynings, and we must have given his address. Remember, his uncle arrived in England the same day he did."
 
"I should have sent him to George, not brought George to him," said Routh. "And there's that uncle of his, Felton; he is no friend of ours, Harr............