not advanced one
single step, but rather had been going always, always back, more and
more, she asked herself, could she say that there was happiness in a
life like that? And was Salve himself happy? She saw him before her as
he was in his early youth, and as he was now--gloomy, savage, and
suspicious in his home; she thought how she welcomed him always with
disguised dread instead of with a wife's joy, how they had last parted,
and what feelings she had since entertained; and she dwelt long and
bitterly upon the contrast. To think that it should have come to this
between them! She began with dread to reflect, "Perhaps this is what
they mean by an unhappy marriage." It had never occurred to her before
that such a thing could be said of her--of her, who had married the man
whom of all others in the whole world she wished to marry.

She sat on far into the night with her hands folded on her knee, and
gazing straight before her, the night-light from the glass behind the
bed throwing its faint light over the room. Fru Beck's words, as she
stood there so pale, and told her of her unhappiness, recurred to her
again and again, more distinctly, it seemed, each time. "I am dying
every day. I know best myself how much is left of me. It is very little,
and will soon be less."

It seemed then all in a moment to flash upon her--

"That is just how Salve and I are living. We are wasting away--we are
dying every day beside each other. That is what people do who are
unhappily married."

She sat for a long while, with her head bent forward, sorrowfully
engrossed with this thought. In all the self-sacrifice she had
practised, because she thought he could not bear to hear the truth, she
saw now nothing but one long corroding lie. It was owing to the want of
confidence in each other, of mutual candour--to their both having
shunned the truth, the only sure ground of happiness, that their life
together had been thus spoilt. She threw back her head with a look of
wild energy in her face, and never had she looked more handsome than
now, as she exclaimed decisively--

"But there shall be an end of this! Salve and I shall no longer make a
desert of each other's life!" and she rose from her chair in great
agitation.

"What are you saying, Elizabeth?" asked her aunt, whom she had
unconsciously awakened.

"Nothing, dear aunt," she answered, and bent over the invalid with a cup
of broth, which she had been keeping warm over the night-light