l--the stifling! the
hopeless cramp! Let us go and garden. Rhoda, have you got laudanum in
the house?"

Rhoda shook her head, too sick at heart to speak. They went into the
garden, which was Dahlia's healthfullest place. It seemed to her that
her dead mother talked to her there. That was not a figure of speech,
when she said she felt buried alive. She was in the state of sensational
delusion. There were times when she watched her own power of motion
curiously: curiously stretched out her hands, and touched things, and
moved them. The sight was convincing, but the shudder came again. In
a frame less robust the brain would have given way. It was the very
soundness of the brain which, when her blood was a simple tide of life
in her veins, and no vital force, had condemned her to see the wisdom
and the righteousness of the act of sacrifice committed by her, and had
urged her even up to the altar. Then the sudden throwing off of the mask
by that man to whom she had bound herself, and the reading of Edward's
letter of penitence and love, thwarted reason, but without blinding or
unsettling it. Passion grew dominant; yet against such deadly matters
on all sides had passion to strive, that, under a darkened sky, visibly
chained, bound down, and hopeless, she felt between-whiles veritably
that she was a living body buried. Her senses had become semi-lunatic.

She talked reasonably; and Rhoda, hearing her question and answer at
meal-times like a sane woman, was in doubt whether her sister wilfully
simulated a partial insanity when they were alone together. Now, in the
garden, Dahlia said: "All those flowers, my dear, have roots in mother
and me. She can't feel them, for her soul's in heaven. But mine is down
there. The pain is the trying to get your soul loose. It's the edge of a
knife that won't cut through. Do you know that?"

Rhoda said, as acquiescingly as she could, "Yes."

"Do you?" Dahlia whispered. "It's what they call the 'agony.' Only, to
go through it in the dark, when you are all alone! boarded round! you
will never know that. And there's an angel brings me one of mother's
roses, and I smell it. I see fields of snow; and it's warm there, and
no labour for breath. I see great beds of flowers; I pass them like a
breeze. I'm shot, and knock on the ground, and they bury me for dead
again. Indeed, dearest, it's true."

She meant, true as regarded her sensations. Rhoda could barely give
a smile for response; and Dahlia'