lowers, the friendly sighing of her
lime-tree, the wants of her cottagers; bereaved of that busy monotony of
little home things which is the stay and solace of lonely women, she was
extraordinarily lost. Even music for review seemed to have failed her.
She had never lived in London, so that she had not the refuge of old
haunts and habits, but had to make her own--and to make habits and haunts
required a heart that could at least stretch out feelers and lay hold of
things, and her heart was not now able. When she had struggled with her
Edwardian flat, and laid down her simple routine of meals, she was as
stranded as ever was, convict let out of prison. She had not even that
great support, the necessity of hiding her feelings for fear of
disturbing others. She was planted there, with her longing and grief,
and nothing, nobody, to take her out of herself. Having wilfully
embraced this position, she tried to make the best of it, feeling it less
intolerable, at all events, than staying on at Monkland, where she had
made that grievous, and unpardonable error--falling in love.

This offence, on the part of one who felt within herself a great capacity
to enjoy and to confer happiness, had arisen--like the other grievous and
unpardonable offence, her marriage--from too much disposition to yield
herself to the personality of another. But it was cold comfort to know
that the desire to give and to receive love had twice over left her--a
dead woman. Whatever the nature of those immature sensations with which,
as a girl of twenty, she had accepted her husband, in her feeling towards
Miltoun there was not only abandonment, but the higher flame of
self-renunciation. She wanted to do the best for him, and had not even
the consolation of the knowledge that she had sacrificed herself for his
advantage. All had been taken out of her hands! Yet with characteristic
fatalism she did not feel rebellious. If it were ordained that she
should, for fifty, perhaps sixty years, repent in sterility and ashes
that first error of her girlhood, rebellion was, none the less, too
far-fetched. If she rebelled, it would not be in spirit, but in action.
General principles were nothing to her; she lost no force brooding over
the justice or injustice of her situation, but merely tried to digest its
facts.

The whole day, succeeding Courtier's visit, was spent by her in the
National Gallery, whose roof, alone of all in London, seemed to offer her
pr