she was powerless to cope with Sunday and the night beyond that.

The remarkable revelation made to her by Mrs. Moon was so great a shock
that her mind refused to realize it all at once. It was an outrage to all
the meek reticences and chastities of her spirit. But she owned its
truth; she saw it now, the thing they all had seen, that she only could
not see.

She had sinned the sin of sins, the sin of youth in middle-age.

Now it was not imagination in Miss Quincey, so much as the tradition of
St. Sidwell's, that gave her innocent affection the proportions of a
crime. Miss Quincey had lived all her life in ignorance of her own
nature, having spent the best part of five-and-forty years in acquiring
other knowledge. She had nothing to go upon, for she had never been
young; or rather she had treated her youth unkindly, she had fed it on
saw-dust and given it nothing but arithmetic books to play with, so that
its experiences were of no earthly use to her.

And now, if they had only let her alone, she might have been none the
wiser; her folly might have put on many quaint disguises, friendship,
literary sympathy, intellectual esteem--there were a thousand delicate
subterfuges and innocent hypocrisies, and under any one of them it might
have crept about unchallenged in the shadows and blind alleys of thought.
As love pure and simple, if it came to that, there was no harm in it.
Many an old maid, older than she, has just such a secret folded up and
put away all sweet and pure; the poor lady does not call it love, but
remembrance, which is so to speak love laid in lavender; and she--who
knows? She might have contrived a little shrine for it somewhere; she had
always understood that love was a holy thing.