of
martyrdom, according to their faith: you see its marks sometimes in a
frivolous old age going down with tawdry hopes and starved eyes to the
grave; you see its victory in the freshest, fullest lives in the earth.
This woman had accepted her trial, but she took it up as an inflexible
fate which she did not understand; it was new to her; its solitude, its
hopeless thirst were freshly bitter. She loathed herself as one whom God
had thought unworthy of every woman's right,--to love and be loved.

She went to the window, looking blankly out into the gray cold. Any
one with keen analytic eye, noting the thin muscles of this woman, the
childish, scarlet lips, the eyes deep, concealing, would have foretold
that she would conquer in the trial, that she would force her soul
down,--but that the forcing down would leave the weak, flaccid body
spent and dead. One thing was certain: no curious eyes would see the
struggle; the body might be nerveless or sickly, but it had the great
power of reticence; the calm with which she faced the closest gaze was
natural to her,--no mask. When she left her room and went down, the
same unaltered quiet that had baffled Knowles steadied her step and
cooled her eyes.

After you have made a sacrifice of yourself for others, did you ever
notice how apt you were to doubt, as soon as the deed was irrevocable,
whether, after all, it were worth while to have done it? How poor seems
the good gained! How new and unimagined the agony of empty hands and
stifled wish! Very slow the angels are, sometimes, that are sent to
minister!

Margaret, going down the stairs that morning, found none of the
chivalric unselfish glow of the night before in her home. It was an old,
bare house in the midst of dreary moors, in which her life was slowly to
be worn out: that was all. It did not matter; life was short: she could
thank God for that at least.

She opened the house-door. A draught of cold morning air struck her
face, sweeping from the west; it had driven the fog in great gray banks
upon the hills, or in shimmering broken swamps into the cleft hollows:
a vague twilight filled the space left bare. Tiger, asleep in the hall,
rushed out into the meadow, barking, wild with the freshness and cold,
then back again to tear round her for a noisy good-morning. The touch of
the dog seemed to bring her closer to his master; she put him away; she
dared not suffer even that treachery to her purpose: because, in fact,
the v