ing her lord round to his usual state of active submission; or
perhaps, if we strive to do her full justice, we may say of her that
her effort was made conscientiously, with the idea of inducing him
to do his duty with proper activity. For she was a woman not without
a conscience, and by no means indifferent to the real service which
her husband, as bishop of the diocese, was bound to render to the
affairs of the Church around her. Of her own struggles after personal
dominion she was herself unconscious; and no doubt they gave her,
when recognised and acknowledged by herself, many stabs to her inner
self, of which no single being in the world knew anything. And now,
as after a while she failed in producing any amelioration in the
bishop's mood, her temper also gave way, and things were becoming
very gloomy and very unpleasant.

The bishop and his wife were at present alone in the palace. Their
married daughter and her husband had left them, and their unmarried
daughter was also away. How far the bishop's mood may have produced
this solitude in the vast house I will not say. Probably Mrs
Proudie's state of mind may have prevented her from having other
guests in the place of those who were gone. She felt herself to be
almost disgraced in the eyes of all those around her by her husband's
long absence from the common rooms of the house and by his dogged
silence at meals. It was better, she thought, that they two should be
alone in the palace.

Her own efforts to bring him back to something like life, to some
activity of mind if not of body, were made constantly; and when she
failed, as she did fail day after day, she would go slowly to her own
room, and lock her door, and look back in her solitude at all the
days of her life. She had agonies in these minutes of which no one
near her knew anything. She would seize with her arm the part of
the bed near which she would stand, and hold by it, grasping it, as
though she were afraid to fall; and then, when it was at the worst
with her, she would go to her closet,--a closet that no eyes ever saw
unlocked but her own,--and fill for herself and swallow some draught;
and then she would sit down with the Bible before her, and read it
sedulously. She spent hours every day with her Bible before her,
repeating to herself whole chapters, which she knew almost by heart.

It cannot be said that she was a bad woman, though she had in her
time done an indescribable amount of evil. She had