ut of
the self-satisfaction in which they burrow. A fault, if only it be great
and plain enough to exceed their powers of self-justification, may then
be, of God's mercy, not indeed an angel of light to draw them, but
verily a goblin of darkness to terrify them out of themselves. For the
powers of darkness are His servants also, though incapable of knowing
it: He who is first and last can, even of those that love the lie, make
slaves of the truth. And they who will not be sons shall be slaves, let
them rant and wear crowns as they please in the slaves' quarters.

"You must not expect him to get over such a shock all at once," said
Dorothy. "--It may be," she continued, "that you were wrong in running
away from him. I do not pretend to judge between you, but, perhaps,
after the injury you had done him, you ought to have left it with him to
say what you were to do next. By taking it in your own hands, you may
have only added to the wrong."

"And who helped me?" returned Juliet, in a tone of deep reproach.

"Helped you to run from him, Juliet!--Really, if you were in the habit
of behaving to your husband as you do to me--!" She checked herself, and
resumed calmly--"You forget the facts of the case, my dear. So far from
helping you to run from him, I stopped you from running so far that
neither could he find you, nor you return to him again. But now we must
make the best of it by waiting. We must find out whether he wants you
again, or your absence is a relief to him. If I had been a man, I should
have been just as wild as he."

She had seen in Juliet some signs that self-abhorrence was wanting, and
self-pity reviving, and she would connive at no unreality in her
treatment of herself. She was one thing when bowed to the earth in
misery and shame, and quite another if thinking herself hardly used on
all sides.

It was a strange position for a young woman to be in--that of watcher
over the marriage relations of two persons, to neither of whom she could
be a friend otherwise than _ab extra_. Ere long she began almost to
despair. Day after day she heard or saw that Faber continued sunk in
himself, and how things were going there she could not tell. Was he
thinking about the wife he had lost, or brooding over the wrong she had
done him? There was the question--and who was to answer it? At the same
time she was all but certain, that, things being as they were, any
reconciliation that might be effected would owe itself merely