of a human life thus
flung upon her.

She was struck with a dryness, a numbness, that appalled her. She tried
still to soothe and comfort, but nothing that she said went home--took
hold. Between the feeling in her heart which might have reached and
touched this despair, and the woman before her, there seemed to be a
barrier she could not break. Or was it that she was really barren and
poor in soul, and had never realised it before? A strange misery rose in
her too, as she still knelt, tending and consoling, but with no
efficacy--no power.

At last Mrs. Vincent sank into miserable quiet again. The mother came
in, and silently began to put the children to bed. Marcella pressed the
wife's cold hand, and went out hanging her head. She had just reached
the door when it opened, and a man entered. A thrill passed through her
at the sight of his honest, haggard face, and this time she found what
to say.

"I have been sitting by your wife, Mr. Vincent. She is very ill and
miserable, and very penitent. You will be kind to her?"

The husband looked at her, and then turned away.

"God help us!" he said; and Marcella went without another word, and
with that same wild, unaccustomed impulse of prayer rilling her being
which had first stirred in her at Mellor at the awful moment of Hurd's
death.

* * * * *

She was very silent and distracted at tea, and afterwards--saying that
she must write some letters and reports--she shut herself up, and bade
good-night to Minta and the children.

But she did not write or read. She hung at the window a long time,
watching the stars come out, as the summer light died from the sky, and
even the walls and roofs and chimneys of this interminable London spread
out before her took a certain dim beauty. And then, slipping down on the
floor, with her head against a chair--an attitude of her stormy
childhood--she wept with an abandonment and a passion she had not known
for years. She thought of Mrs. Jervis--the saint--so near to death, so
satisfied with "grace," so steeped in the heavenly life; then of the
poor sinner she had just left and of the agony she had no power to stay.
Both experiences had this in common--that each had had some part in
plunging her deeper into this darkness of self-contempt.

What had come to her? Daring the past weeks there had been something
wrestling in her--some new birth--some "conviction of sin," as Mrs.
Jervis would have said. As sh