ver from her own keeping to that of
another. For she never, from the moment she wrote her letter, had the
smallest doubt as to what his answer to her would be; never the smallest
dread that he would, even in the lightest passing impression, connect
what she was going to do with any thought of blame or wonder. Her pride
and fear were gone out of her; only, she dared not think of how he would
look and speak when the moment came, because it made her sick and faint
with feeling.

How strange to imagine what, no doubt, would be said and thought about
her return to him by the outside world! His great place in society, his
wealth, would be the obvious solution of it for many--too obvious even
to be debated. Looking back upon her thoughts of this night in after
years, she could not remember that the practical certainty of such an
interpretation had even given her a moment's pain. It was too remote
from all her now familiar ways of thinking--and his. In her early Mellor
days the enormous importance that her feverish youth attached to wealth
and birth might have been seen in her very attacks upon them. Now all
her standards were spiritualised. She had come to know what happiness
and affection are possible in three rooms, or two, on twenty-eight
shillings a week; and, on the other hand, her knowledge of Aldous--a man
of stoical and simple habit, thrust, with a student's tastes, into the
position of a great landowner--had shown her, in the case at least of
one member of the rich class, how wealth may be a true moral burden and
test, the source of half the difficulties and pains--of half the
nobleness also--of a man's life. Not in mere wealth and poverty, she
thought, but in things of quite another order--things of social sympathy
and relation--alterable at every turn, even under existing conditions,
by the human will, lie the real barriers that divide us man from man.

Had they ever really formed a part of historical time, those eight
months of their engagement? Looking back upon them, she saw herself
moving about in them like a creature without eyes, worked, blindfold, by
a crude inner mechanism that took no account really of impressions from
without. Yet that passionate sympathy with the poor--that hatred of
oppression? Even these seemed to her to-night the blind, spasmodic
efforts of a mind that all through _saw_ nothing--mistook its own
violences and self-wills for eternal right, and was but traitor to what
should have been it