details of that home-life; how Bates had ruled, commanded,
praised, and chidden, and she had been indifferent to his rule until an
hour of fear had turned indifference into hate. It was very strange to
look at it all now, to lay it side by side with a lover's kiss and this
same man her lover.

Perhaps it was a sense of new power that thrilled her so strangely. It
needed no course of reasoning to tell her that she was mistress now, and
he slave. His words had never conveyed it to her, but by this sign she
knew it with the same sort of certainty we have that there is life in
breath. She had sought power, but not this power. Of this dominion she
had never dreamed, but she was not so paltry at heart but that it
humbled her. She whispered to herself that she wished this had not been;
and yet she knew that to herself she lied, for she would rather have
obliterated all else in the universe than the moment in which Bates had
said farewell. The universe held for her, as for everyone, just so much
of the high and holy as she had opened her heart to; and, poor girl, her
heart had been shut so that this caress of the man whose life had been
nearly wrecked by her deed was the highest, holiest thing that had yet
found entrance there, and it brought with it into the darkness of her
heart, unrecognised but none the less there, the Heaven which is beyond
all selfless love, the God who is its source. Other men might have
proffered lavish affection in vain, but in this man's kiss, coming out
of his humiliation and resignation, there breathed the power that moves
the world.

She did not consider now whether Bates's suffering had been of his own
making or hers. She was not now engaged in an exercise of repentance;
compunction, if she felt it, came to her in a nervous tremor, a sob, a
tear, not in intelligible thought. Her memory gave her pictures, and the
rest was feeling--dumb, even within. She crouched upon the floor and
leaned her head against the bedside. Dry, trembling sobs came at
intervals, passing over her as if some outside force had shaken and left
her again; and sometimes, in the quiet of the interval, her lips smiled,
but the darkness was around. Then, at length, came tranquillity. Her
imagination, which had been strained to work at the bidding of memory,
in weariness released itself from hard reality, and in a waking dream,
touched, no doubt, into greater vividness by hovering hands of Sleep,
she found temporary rest. Dreams p