netian blind, from whose teasing divisions
of glare and shade she had been hiding her eyes from the time she
had come in, fretted by the low continuous tap of its laths upon the
shutters. Her first involuntary exclamation was a sigh of relief.

"Oh, thank you. I did not know what it was that was such a nuisance."

"This is too much glare. Let me turn your sofa a little way round from
it."

And as he did so, and she raised herself, he shook out her cushions,
and substituted a cool chintz covered one for the hot crimson damask on
which her head had been resting. "Thank you! How do you know so well?"
she said with a long breath of satisfaction.

"By long trial," he said, very quietly seating himself beside her couch,
with a stillness of manner that strangely hushed all her throbbings;
and the very pleasure of lying really still was such that she did not
at once break it. The lull of these few moments was inexpressibly sweet,
but the pang that had crossed her so many times in the last two days and
nights could not but return. She moved restlessly, and he leant towards
her with a soft-toned inquiry what it was she wanted.

"Don't," she said, raising herself. "No, don't! I have thought more
over what you said," she continued, as if repeating the sentence she
had conned over to herself. "You have been most generous, most noble;
but--but," with an effort of memory, "it would be wrong in me to accept
such--oh! such a sacrifice; and when I tell you all, you will think it
a duty to turn from me," she added, pressing her hands to her temples.
"And mind, you are not committed--you are free."

"Tell me," he said, bending towards her.

"I know you cannot overlook it! My faith--it is all confusion," she said
in a low awe-struck voice. "I do believe--I do wish to believe; but my
grasp seems gone. I cannot rest or trust for thinking of the questions
that have been raised! There," she added in a strange interrogative
tone.

"It is a cruel thing to represent doubt as the sign of intellect," Alick
said sadly; "but you will shake off the tormentors when the power of
thinking and reasoning is come back."

"Oh, if I could think so! The misery of darkness
here--there--everywhere--the old implicit reliance gone, and all
observance seeming like hypocrisy and unreality. There is no thinking,
no enduring the intolerable maze."

"Do not try to think now. You cannot bear it. We will try to face what
difficulties remain when you are strong