the morning brought a calmer reflection; and when Hermione was
awake she began to think of what had passed. The horror inspired by her
aunt's words and looks faded before the greater anxiety of the girl's
position with regard to Paul. She tried to go over the interview in her
mind. Her conscience told her that she had done right, but her heart
said that she had done wrong, and its beating hurt her. Then came the
difficult task of reconciling those two opposing voices, which are never
so contradictory as when the heart and the conscience fall out, and
argue their cause before the bewildered court of justice we call our
intelligence. First she remembered all the many reasons she had found
for speaking plainly to Paul on the previous night. She had said to
herself that she did not feel sure of her love, allowing tacitly that
she expected to feel sure of it before long. But until the matter was
settled she could not let him hurry the marriage nor take any decisive
step. If he had only been willing to wait another month, he might have
been spared all the suffering she had seen in his face; she herself
could have escaped it, too. But he had insisted, and she had tried to do
right in telling him that she was not ready. Then he had been angry and
hurt, and had coldly told her that she might wait forever, or something
very like it, and she had felt that the deed was done. It was dreadful;
yet how could she tell him that she was ready? Half an hour earlier, on
that very spot, she had suffered Alexander to speak as he had spoken,
only laughing kindly at his expressions of love; not rebuking him and
leaving him, as she should have done, and would have done, had she loved
Paul with her whole heart.

And yet this morning, as she lay awake and thought it all over,
something within her spoke very differently, like an incoherent cry,
telling her that she loved him in spite of all. She tried to listen to
what it said, and then the answer came quickly enough, and told her that
she had been unkind, that she had given needless pain, that she had
broken a man's life for an over-conscientious scruple which had no real
foundation. But then her conscience returned to the charge, refuting the
slighting accusation, so that the confusion was renewed, and became
worse than before. For the sake of discovering something in support of
her action, she began to think about Alexander; and finding that she
remembered very accurately what they had said to