ur, a sharp, immediate anxiety took the place of that intended
resignation; and she quickened her step, with a heart that galloped too
as she went. Then it was, above all, that she felt how _she_ had
understood friendship, and how never again to see the face of the
creature she had taken to her soul would be for her as the stroke of
blindness. The twilight had become thick by the time she reached Marmion
and paused for an instant in front of her house, over which the elms
that stood on the grassy wayside appeared to her to hang a blacker
curtain than ever before.

There was no candle in any window, and when she pushed in and stood in
the hall, listening a moment, her step awakened no answering sound. Her
heart failed her; Verena's staying out in a boat from ten o'clock in the
morning till nightfall was too unnatural, and she gave a cry, as she
rushed into the low, dim parlour (darkened on one side, at that hour, by
the wide-armed foliage, and on the other by the veranda and trellis),
which expressed only a wild personal passion, a desire to take her
friend in her arms again on any terms, even the most cruel to herself.
The next moment she started back, with another and a different
exclamation, for Verena was in the room, motionless, in a corner--the
first place in which she had seated herself on re-entering the
house--looking at her with a silent face which seemed strange,
unnatural, in the dusk. Olive stopped short, and for a minute the two
women remained as they were, gazing at each other in the dimness. After
that, too, Olive still said nothing; she only went to Verena and sat
down beside her. She didn't know what to make of her manner; she had
never been like that before. She was unwilling to speak; she seemed
crushed and humbled. This was almost the worst--if anything could be
worse than what had gone before; and Olive took her hand with an
irresistible impulse of compassion and assurance. From the way it lay in
her own she guessed her whole feeling--saw it was a kind of shame, shame
for her weakness, her swift surrender, her insane gyration, in the
morning. Verena expressed it by no protest and no explanation; she
appeared not even to wish to hear the sound of her own voice. Her
silence itself was an appeal--an appeal to Olive to ask no questions
(she could trust her to inflict no spoken reproach); only to wait till
she could lift up her head again. Olive understood, or thought she
understood, and the woefulness o