ian flat, and laid down her simple routine of meals, she
was as stranded as ever was, convict let out of prison. She had not even
that great support, the necessity of hiding her feelings for fear of
disturbing others. She was planted there, with her longing and grief,
and nothing, nobody, to take her out of herself. Having wilfully
embraced this position, she tried to make the best of it, feeling it
less intolerable, at all events, than staying on at Monkland, where she
had made that grievous, and unpardonable error--falling in love.

This offence, on the part of one who felt within herself a great
capacity to enjoy and to confer happiness, had arisen--like the
other grievous and unpardonable offence, her marriage--from too much
disposition to yield herself to the personality of another. But it was
cold comfort to know that the desire to give and to receive love had
twice over left her--a dead woman. Whatever the nature of those immature
sensations with which, as a girl of twenty, she had accepted her
husband, in her feeling towards Miltoun there was not only abandonment,
but the higher flame of self-renunciation. She wanted to do the best
for him, and had not even the consolation of the knowledge that she
had sacrificed herself for his advantage. All had been taken out of her
hands! Yet with characteristic fatalism she did not feel rebellious. If
it were ordained that she should, for fifty, perhaps sixty years, repent
in sterility and ashes that first error of her girlhood, rebellion was,
none the less, too far-fetched. If she rebelled, it would not be in
spirit, but in action. General principles were nothing to her; she lost
no force brooding over the justice or injustice of her situation, but
merely tried to digest its facts.

The whole day, succeeding Courtier's visit, was spent by her in the
National Gallery, whose roof, alone of all in London, seemed to offer
her protection. She had found one painting, by an Italian master, the
subject of which reminded her of Miltoun; and before this she sat for a
very long time, attracting at last the gouty stare of an official. The
still figure of this lady, with the oval face and grave beauty, both
piqued his curiosity, and stimulated certain moral qualms. She, was
undoubtedly waiting for her lover. No woman, in his experience, had ever
sat so long before a picture without ulterior motive; and he kept his
eyes well opened to see what this motive would be like. It gave him,
th