r acts had been guided by hallucination. Never would sorrow for her
parents cease to abide with her, but sorrow cannot be the sustenance of
a life through those years when the mind is strongest and the sensations
most vivid. Had she by her self-mortification done aught to pleasure
those dear ones who slept their last sleep? It had been the predominant
feature of her morbid passion to believe that piety demanded such a
sacrifice. Grief may reach such a point that to share the uttermost fate
of the beloved one seems blessedness; in Emily's mind that moment of
supreme agony had been protracted till unreasoning desire took to itself
the guise of duty. Duty so represented cannot maintain its sanction when
the wounds of nature grow towards healing.

She strove with herself. The reaction she was experiencing seemed to her
a shameful weakness. Must she cease to know the self-respect which comes
of conscious perseverance in a noble effort? Must she stand
self-condemned, an ignoble nature, incapable of anything good and
great--and that, after all her ambitions? Was she a mere waif, at the
mercy of the currents of sense? Never before had she felt this
condemnation of her own spirit. She had suffered beyond utterance, but
ever with a support which kept her from the last despair; of her anguish
had come inspiration. Now she felt herself abandoned of all spiritual
good. She came to loathe her life as a polluted stream. The image of
Wilfrid, the memory of her lost love, these grew to be symbols of her
baseness. It was too much to face those with whom daily duty brought her
in contact; surely they must read in her face the degradation of which
she was conscious. As much as possible she kept apart from all, nursing
her bitter self-reproach.

Then it was that she sought relief in the schemes which naturally occur
to a woman thus miserable. She would relinquish her life as a teacher,
and bury her wretchedness beneath physical hardship. There was anguish
enough in the world, and she would go to live in the midst of it, would
undertake the hardest and most revolting tasks in some infirmary: thus
might she crush out of herself the weakness which was her disgrace. It
remained only a vision. That which was terribly real, the waste and woe
of her heart, grew ever.

She yielded. Was not the true sin this that she tried to accomplish--the
slaying of the love which cried so from her inmost being? Glimpses of
the old faith began to be once more v