n order to prove that at no moment had
she been aware of not acting in accordance with her conscience! The
whole of her conduct had been against her conscience, but pride and
selfishness had made her deaf to conscience. She was the Sinner.

Her despair, except when at intervals she became the loathed epileptic
shape, had been calm. Its symptoms had been, and remained, a complete
lack of energy, and a most extraordinary black indifference to the
surrounding world. Save in the deep centre of her soul, where she
agonized, she seemed to have lost all capacity for emotion. Nothing
moved her, or even interested her. She sat in the house, and ate a
little, and talked a little, like an automaton. She walked about the
streets like a bored exile, but an exile who has forgotten his home. Her
spirit never responded to the stimulus of environment. Suggestions at
once lost their tonic force in the woolly cushion of her apathy. If she
continued to live, it was by inertia; to cease from life would have
required an effort. She did not regret the vocation which she had
abandoned; she felt no curiosity about the fortunes of the newspaper. A
tragic nonchalance held her.

After several weeks she had naturally begun to think of religion; for
the malady alone was proof enough that she had a profoundly religious
nature. Miss Gailey could rarely go to church, but one Sunday morning--
doubtless with intent--she asked Hilda if they should go together, and
Hilda agreed. As they approached the large, high-spired church, Hilda
had vague prickings of hope, and was thereby much astonished. But the
service in no way responded to her expectations. "How silly I am!" she
thought disdainfully. "This sort of thing has never moved me before. Why
should it move me now?" The sermon, evangelical, was upon the Creed, and
the preacher explained the emotional quality of real belief. It was a
goodish sermon. But the preacher had effectually stopped the very last
of those exquisite vague prickings of hope. Hilda agreed with his
definition of real belief, and she knew that real belief was impossible
for her. She could never say, with joyous fervour: "I believe!" At best
she could only assert that she did not disbelieve--and was she so sure
even of that? No! Belief had been denied to her; and to dream of
consolation from religion was sentimentally womanish; even in her
indifference she preferred straightforward, honest damnation to the soft
self-deceptions of feminin