ake her. Margaret had suffered from an
exasperating sense of injury; but that was only for a few hours. Hers
was not a nature which could retain personal resentment for any length
of time. She needed the relief of compassionate and forgiving feelings;
and she cast herself into them for solace, as the traveller, emerging
from the glaring desert, throws himself down beside the gushing spring
in the shade. From the moment that she did this, it became her chief
trouble that Philip was blamed by others. Her friends said as little as
they could in reference to him, out of regard for her feelings; but she
could not help seeing that Maria's indignation was strong, and that
Hester considered that her sister had had a happy escape from a man
capable of treating her as Philip had done. If it had been possible to
undertake his defence, Margaret would have done so. As there were no
means of working upon others to forgive her wrongs, she made it her
consolation to forgive them doubly herself; to cheer up under them; to
live for the aim of being more worthy of Philip's love, the less he
believed her to be so. Her lot was far easier now than it had been in
the winter. She had been his; and she believed that she still occupied
his whole soul. She was not now the solitary, self-despising being she
had felt herself before. Though cut off from intercourse with him as if
the grave lay between them, she knew that sympathy with her heart and
mind existed. She experienced the struggles, the moaning efforts, of
affections doomed to solitude and silence; the shrinking from a whole
long life of self-reliance, of exclusion from domestic life; the
occasional horror of contemplating the waste and withering of some of
the noblest parts of the immortal nature,--a waste and withering which
are the almost certain consequence of violence done to its instincts and
its laws. From these pains and terrors she suffered; and from some of
smaller account,--from the petty insults, or speculations of the more
coarse-minded of her neighbours, and the being too suddenly reminded by
passing circumstances of the change which had come over her expectations
and prospects; but her love, her forgiveness, her conviction of being
beloved, bore her through all these, and saved her from that fever of
the heart, in the paroxysms of which she had, in her former and severer
trial, longed for death, even for non-existence.

She could enjoy but little of what had been