ly to the torture of interrogation; "Do you,
can you care for him still?" and sighed in shame and fear of her sister,
not daring to say she thought her harsh, not daring to plead for escape,
as she had done with Robert.

"Why is there no place for the unhappy, who do not wish to live, and
cannot die?" she moaned.

And Rhoda cruelly fixed her to the marriage, making it seem irrevocable,
and barring all the faint lights to the free outer world, by praise of
her--passionate praise of her--when she confessed, that half inanimate
after her recovery from the fever, and in the hope that she might
thereby show herself to her father, she had consented to devote her life
to the only creature who was then near her to be kind to her. Rhoda
made her relate how this man had seen her first, and how, by untiring
diligence, he had followed her up and found her. "He--he must love you,"
said Rhoda; and in proportion as she grew more conscious of her sister's
weakness, and with every access of tenderness toward her, she felt that
Dahlia must be thought for very much as if she were a child.

Dahlia tried to float out some fretting words for mercy, on one or other
of her heavy breathings; but her brain was under lead. She had a thirst
for Rhoda's praise in her desolation; it was sweet, though the price of
it was her doing an abhorred thing. Abhorred? She did not realize the
consequences of the act, or strength would have come to her to wrestle
with the coil: a stir of her blood would have endued her with womanly
counsel and womanly frenzy; nor could Rhoda have opposed any real
vehemence of distaste to the union on Dahlia's part. But Dahlia's blood
was frozen, her brain was under lead. She clung to the poor delight
in her sister's praise, and shuddered and thirsted. She caught at the
minutes, and saw them slip from her. All the health of her thoughts
went to establish a sort of blind belief that God; having punished
her enough, would not permit a second great misery to befall her. She
expected a sudden intervention, even though at the altar. She argued to
herself that misery, which follows sin, cannot surely afflict us further
when we are penitent, and seek to do right: her thought being, that
perchance if she refrained from striving against the current, and if
she suffered her body to be borne along, God would be the more merciful.
With the small cunning of an enfeebled spirit, she put on a mute
submissiveness, and deceived herself by it s