oon had those words come true. The judgment had
fallen. He had gone from her, but she could not go to him. Their love,
unlawful in this world, could never be ratified in another. And then,
indeed, there fell upon her the gloom of outer darkness. There was no
hope.

CHAPTER TWENTY SIX.

"AND THE SUMMER'S NIGHT IS A WINTER'S DAY."

For Eanswyth Carhayes the sun of life had indeed set.

The first numbing shock of the fearful news over, a period of even
greater agony supervened. He who had succeeded in setting free the
wholly unsuspected volcanic fires of her strong and passionate nature--
him, her first and only love--she would never see again in life. If she
had sinned in yielding to a love that was unlawful, surely she was
expiating it now. The punishment seemed greater than she could bear.

She made no outcry--no wild demonstrations of grief. Her sorrow was too
real, too sacred, for any such commonplace manifestations. But when she
emerged from her first retirement, it was as a walking ghost. There was
something about that strained and unnatural calm, something which
overawed those who saw it. She was as one walking outside the world and
its incidents. They feared for her brain.

As the days slipped by, people wondered. It seemed strange that poor
Tom Carhayes should have the faculty of inspiring such intense affection
in anybody. No one suspected anything more than the most ordinary of
easy-going attachment to exist between him and his wife, yet that the
latter was now a broken-hearted woman was but too sadly obvious. Well,
there must have been far more in the poor fellow than he had generally
been credited with, said the popular voice, and after all, those outside
are not of necessity the best judges as to the precise relationship
existing between two people. So sympathy for Eanswyth was widespread
and unfeigned.

Yet amid all her heart-torture, all her aching and hopeless sorrow, poor
Tom's fate hardly obtruded itself. In fact, had she been capable of a
thorough and candid self-analysis she would have been forced to admit
that it was rather a matter for gratulation than otherwise, for under
cover of it she was enabled to indulge her heart-broken grief to the
uttermost. Apart from this, horrible as it may seem, her predominating
feeling toward her dead husband was that of intense bitterness and
resentment. He it was who had led the others into peril. That
aggressive fool-hardiness of h