Her opinion was very much to
him. Though in his anger he had determined to throw her off from
him, he knew her to be one whose good opinion was worth having.
Not a word of overt accusation had been made against his wife.
Every allusion to her was full of love. But yet how heavy a charge
was really made! That such a secret should be kept from him, the
father, was acknowledged to be a heinous fault;--but the wife had
known the secret and had kept it from him the father! And then
how wretched a thing it was for him that anyone should dare to
write to him about the wife that had been taken away from him! In
spite of all her faults her name was so holy to him that it had
never once passed his lips since her death, except in low whispers
to himself,--low whispers made in the perfect, double-guarded
seclusion of his own chamber. 'Cora, Cora,' he had murmured, so
that the sense of the sound and not the sound itself had come to
him from his own lips. And now this woman wrote to him about her
freely, as though there were nothing sacred, no religion in the
memory of her.
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