haps the vast
misery which lay behind her, the darkness threatening in the future,
brought first to her mind death's attribute of deliverance. This, in the
hours that followed, she strove to dwell upon nothing could touch her
father now, he was safe from trouble. But, as the current in her veins
grew warmer, as life held her with a stronger hand and made her once
more participant in his fears and desires, that apparition of the
motionless veiled form haunted her with access of horror. If she slept
it came into her dreams, and her waking thoughts strove with hideous
wilfulness to unmuffle that dead face. When horror failed, its place was
taken by a grief so intense that it shook the fabric of her being. She
had no relapse in health, but convalescence was severed from all its
natural joys; she grew stronger only to mourn more passionately. In
imagination she followed her father through the hours of despair which
must have ensued on his interview with Dagworthy. She pictured his
struggle between desire to return home, to find comfort among those he
loved, and the bitter shame which forbade it. How had he spent the time?
Did he wander out of the town to lonely places, until daylight failed?
Did he then come back under the shadow of the night, come back all but
to the very door of his dwelling, make one last effort to face those
within, pass on in blind agony? Was he on the heath at the very hour
when she crossed it to go to Dagworthy's house? Oh, had that been his
figure which, as she hurried past, she had seen moving in the darkness
of the quarry?

A pity which at times grew too vast for the soul to contain absorbed her
life, the pity which overwhelms and crushes, which threatens reason.
That he should have lived through long years of the most patient
endurance, keeping ever a hope, a faith, so simple-hearted, so void of
bitter feeling, so kindly disposed to all men--only to be vanquished at
length by a moment of inexplicable weakness, only to creep aside, and
hide his shame, and die. Her father, whom it was her heart's longing to
tend and cherish through the brighter days of his age--lying there in
his grave, where no voice could reach him, remote for ever from the
solace of loving kindness, his death a perpetuation of woe. The cruelty
of fate had exhausted itself; what had the world to show more pitiful
than this?

No light ever came to her countenance; no faintest smile ever touched
her lips. Through the hours, throug