still a living pain
of her infliction. She dared not confidently reckon her vileness against
the capacity of his extravagant love. She dared not. Her full punishment
reached home to her at last.

Her ignorant mortal senses strained to pierce the impenetrable mystery
that had wrapt Christian to an infinite remoteness. For his relief, not
for her own, would she present to him her agonies of love and remorse:
him stanched, averse: him bleeding, tender; to gratify, to satisfy, to
plenish any want.

Tempests of despair raged through that undisciplined soul. Every hope was
cut off, every joy was extinct. The sweet attraction of loving service,
the pride and glory of despotic rule, were not for her, an exile from the
one, and from the other abdicating. In all the world there was no place
for her but this, between sea and land, with a hold on a dead illusion of
Christian, with vain, frantic crying after his reality.

She did not know, whelmed in gulfs of sin and grief and despair, she did
not know how divine a dawn brooded over the waste. From the long-lost
past clear echoes swept of childish prayers, to blend as an undercurrent
with that message her lover had so tried to deliver, that she had
repelled as hideous and grotesque. She used no conscious memory, nor
followed any coherent thought, but, consonant with the first instinct of
her fresh awakened soul, that longing for her mother's sake to make
renunciation, consonant with Christian's finished achievement--his
striving, suffering, enduring even death for her unworthy sake--was this
incoherent impression of a divinity vastly, vaguely suffering in
exemplary extreme out of great compassion and love to mankind, thence
accrediting suffering as the divinest force that can move the world. Her
also it had vanquished.

The tide had turned; it pressed her gently to resume her old way to the
deeps. The drift of another tide took her.

Out of her futile striving for direct communion with Christian grew a
sense that the sole possibility left to her was to yield body and soul to
his will in strict possession, and to follow that guidance. In her great
misery and helpless desolation a how and a whither with quailing beset
her going. Lo! the first step was sure, because it entailed a
heartrending renunciation.

Ah! desperately dear was this, Christian's body, to her mortal
apprehension of him. She held it very closely with an access of love and
worship such as appertains to vacant