he shivered as she went up the stairs, and as soon as she was in her
own room she put up the lights, and then she locked the door, and having
done this she took off her dress and put on her dressing-gown. She sat
down by the fire. How was she to stay on here till Monday: how was she
to endure it? It would be intolerable! May groaned aloud. What right had
she to call it intolerable? What had happened to her? What was
demoralising her, turning her strength into weakness? What was it that
had entered into her soul and was poisoning its health and destroying
its purpose?

A few days ago and she had been steadily pursuing her work. She had been
stifling her sorrow, and filling the vacancy of her life with voluntary
labour. Having no child of her own, she had been filling her empty arms
with the children of other women. She had fed and nursed and loved
babies that would never call her "Mother." She had had no time to think
of herself--no time for regrets--for self-pity. And now, suddenly, her
heart that had been quieted and comforted, her heart that had seemed
quieted and comforted, her heart dismissed all this tender and sacred
work and cried for something else--cried and would not be appeased. She
felt as if all that she had believed fixed and certain in herself and in
her life, was shaken and might topple over, and in the disaster her
soul might be destroyed. She was appalled at herself.

No, no; she must wrestle with this sin, with this devil of self; she
must fight it!

She got up from her chair and went to the dressing-table. There she took
up with a trembling hand a little ivory case, and going back to her seat
she opened it reverently and looked at the face of her boy husband.
There he was in all the bloom of his twenty and six years. It was a
young pleasant face. And he had been such a comrade of her childhood and
girlhood. But strangely enough he had never seen the gulf widening
between them as she grew into a woman older than her years and he into a
man, young for his years; boyish in his view of life, mentally immature.
He was quite unconscious that he never met the deeper wants of her
nature; those depths meant nothing to him. There had been a tacit
understanding between them from their childhood that they should marry;
an understanding encouraged by their parents. When at last May found out
her mistake; that this bondage was irksome and her heart unsatisfied, he
had suddenly thrown the responsibility of his ha