and, pulling up the blind, gazed moodily out of
the window till her maid's preparations were at an end. Romantic trees
and a landscape, almost artificial in its prettiness, surrounded Hadley.
The sun was setting in a fire, burnishing with enamel tints the long
green hills which ranged as a natural fortification across the horizon,
shutting out a whole country of flat fields beyond. The moon, in its
first quarter, shone out above a distant steeple where the eastern sky,
already blue and opalesque, promised the dawn of another day in
reparation for the one then dying in scarlet splendour. But to those who
are unhappy, to-morrow is a word without significance. Sara stretched
out her arms instinctively toward the coming night. She wanted darkness
and she wanted sleep--not the stars of the morning, not the joy of noon.
What should she do? Her mad love for Orange had reached a desperate
point--a point where she realised all too clearly and with bitterness,
that, so far from being a source of strength, it was a curse, a malady,
a humiliation--driving her into that insatiable desire of solitude where
the companionship of dreadful imaginations and gloomy thoughts can rend
the soul at their pleasure. As men are sometimes lured toward dangerous
perils on land, or mountains, or by sea, and from thence to deeds,
discoveries, and crimes unforeseen and unpremeditated, so she seemed
borne along into a whirlpool of feelings which chilled the better
impulses of her nature and accentuated, with acid and fire, every
elementary instinct. Animal powers and spiritual tendencies alike were
concentrated into one absorbing passion which reasoned only in delirium,
incoherently, without issue. She was wretched in Orange's company
because every moment so spent showed her that his heart was fixed far
indeed from her. But the wretchedness suffered that way was stifled in
the torments she endured when she wondered, miserably, in loneliness,
what he was thinking, doing, saying; where he was, with whom he was, and
how he was. The despair of unrequited love was thrice intensified by
jealousy. "Why did he like that little adventuress, that white china
Rahab?" she asked herself again and again. "It is just because she has
bewitched him. It is not real love--it isn't any kind of love. She
cannot care for him as I do. It isn't in her. O why, why does he fight
so hard against me?"

Beautiful women seldom believe that their charms can be resisted without
a fi