ad lately lived
through had produced a sort of numbness of her faculties, which time
seemed to have no intention of restoring to her. To look at her face now
no one would suppose her to be in the ordinary sense of the word an
invalid; for she was rosy, her eyes were bright, her appetite was good,
and she had plenty of strength. Nevertheless there was a certain part of
her being which was numb and cold and half-dead. She was not frightened
about anything; but she knew that she had behaved as no right-minded or
honorable girl should have done. Verena's words that afternoon had roused
her, and had given her a slight degree of pain. She lay down on her bed
without undressing. She left the blind up so that the moon could shine
through her small window, and she kept repeating to herself at intervals
through the night the words that had haunted her when she was at
Easterhaze: "Wash and be clean." It seemed to Pauline that the sea was
drawing her. The insistent voice of the sea was becoming absolutely
unpleasant. It echoed and echoed in her tired brain: "Wash--wash and be
clean." After her accident she had hated the sea while she was there, but
now she wanted to get back to it. She dreaded it and yet she was hungry
for it.

As she lay with her eyes wide open it seemed to her that she was looking
at the sea. It seemed to her, too, that she really did hear the murmur of
the waves. The waves came close, and each wave as it pressed nearer and
nearer to the excited child repeated the old cry: "Wash and be clean."

"Oh, if only I could get to the sea!" was her thought. She pressed her
hand to that part of her forehead which felt numb and strange. All of a
sudden the numbness and strangeness seemed to depart. She saw one vivid
picture after another, and each picture revealed to her the sin which she
had sinned and the wrong she had committed. At last she saw that fearful
picture when she stood with her little sister in the White Bay, and the
waves had so nearly drowned them. She sat up in bed. The idea of going
straight to Aunt Sophia and of telling her everything did not occur to
her. She wanted to get back to the sea. How could she manage this? She
was not in the least afraid of Aunt Sophy; she was only afraid of the God
whom she had offended. She got up, pushed back her black hair, tied it
neatly behind her ears, and taking her little sailor-hat and her
dark-blue serge jacket, she put them on. She would go back to the sea.
She did