knew not how or why, she felt that her mother
had forsworn herself. A strong shudder passed through her; she rose and
was leaving the room in silence.

"Where are you going, hussy? Stop!" screamed her mother between her
teeth, her rage and cruelty rising, as it will with weak natures, in the
very act of triumph,--"to your young man?"

"To pray," said Grace, quietly; and locking herself into the empty
schoolroom, gave vent to all her feelings, but not in tears.

How she upbraided herself!--She had not used her strength; she had not
told her mother all her heart. And yet how could she tell her heart? How
face her mother with such vague suspicions, hardly supported by a single
fact? How argue it out against her like a lawyer, and convict her to her
face? What daughter could do that, who had human love and reverence left
in her? No! to touch her inward witness, as the Quakers well and truly
term it, was the only method: and it had failed. "God help me!" was her
only cry: but the help did not come yet; there came over her instead a
feeling of utter loneliness. Willis dead; Thurnall gone; her mother
estranged; and, like a child lost upon a great moor, she looked round
all heaven and earth, and there was none to counsel, none to guide--
perhaps not even God. For would He help her as long as she lived in sin?
And was she not living in sin, deadly sin, as long as she knew what she
was sure she knew, and left the wrong unrighted?

It is sometimes true, the popular saying, that sunshine comes after
storm. Sometimes true, or who could live? but not always: not even
often. Equally true is the popular antithet, that misfortunes never come
single; that in most human lives there are periods of trouble, blow
following blow, wave following wave, from opposite and unexpected
quarters, with no natural or logical sequence, till all God's billows
have gone over the soul.

How paltry and helpless, in such dark times, are all theories of mere
self-education; all proud attempts, like that of Goethe's Wilhelm
Meister, to hang self-poised in the centre of the abyss, and there
organise for oneself a character by means of circumstances! Easy enough,
and graceful enough does that dream look, while all the circumstances
themselves--all which stands around--are easy and graceful, obliging and
commonplace, like the sphere of petty experiences with which Goethe
surrounds his insipid hero. Easy enough it seems for a man to educate
himself without G