. Her sense of
his love and generosity was as disinterested as if some other person had
been their object. Her admiration was such as one feels for a hero of
history or fiction.

Often, when all within her seemed growing hard and still and dead, she
felt that crying would make her feel better. At such times, to help her
to cry, for the tears did not flow easily, she would sit down to the
piano, the only times she ever touched it, and play over some of the
simple airs associated with her life at home. Sometimes, after playing
and crying a while, she would lapse into sweetly mournful day-dreams of
how happy she might have been if she had returned Henry's love in those
old days. She wondered in a puzzled way why it was that she had not. It
seemed so strange to her now that she could have failed in doing so. But
all this time it was only as a might-have-been that she thought of loving
him, as one who feels himself mortally sick thinks of what he might have
done when he was well, as a life-convict thinks of what he might have
done when free, as a disembodied spirit might think of what it might have
done when living. The consciousness of her disgrace, ever with her, had,
in the past month or two, built up an impassable wall between her past
life and her present state of existence. She no longer thought of herself
in the present tense, still less the future.

He had not kissed her since that kiss at their first interview, which
threw her into such a paroxysm of weeping. But one evening, when she had
been more silent and dull than usual, and more unresponsive to his
efforts to interest her, as he rose to go he drew her a moment to his
side and pressed his lips to hers, as if constrained to find some
expression for the tenderness so cruelly balked of any outflow in words.
He went quickly out, but she continued to stand motionless, in the
attitude of one startled by a sudden discovery. There was a frightened
look in her dilated eyes. Her face was flooded to the roots of her hair
with a deep flush. It was a crimson most unlike the tint of blissful
shame with which the cheeks announce love's dawn in happy hearts. She
threw herself upon the sofa, and buried her scorched face in the pillow
while her form shook with dry sobs.

Love had, in a moment, stripped the protecting cicatrice of a hard
indifference from her smarting shame, and it was as if for the first time
she were made fully conscious of the desperation of her condition.