When there he had asked Lady Laura to be his own
wife, and she had then told him that she was to become the wife of
the owner of that domain. He remembered the blow as though it had
been struck but yesterday, and yet the pain of the blow had not been
long enduring. But though then rejected he had always been the chosen
friend of the woman,--a friend chosen after an especial fashion. When
he had loved another woman this friend had resented his defection
with all a woman's jealousy. He had saved the husband's life, and had
then become also the husband's friend, after that cold fashion which
an obligation will create. Then the husband had been jealous, and
dissension had come, and the ill-matched pair had been divided, with
absolute ruin to both of them, as far as the material comforts and
well-being of life were concerned. Then he, too, had been ejected, as
it were, out of the world, and it had seemed to him as though Laura
Standish and Robert Kennedy had been the inhabitants of another
hemisphere. Now he was about to see them both again, both separately;
and to become the medium of some communication between them.
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