be able to divine the past which she hugs in bitterness to her soul
like a remorse; it is like an avalanche in a valley; it laid all waste
before it found a permanent resting-place.

The Marquise was suffering from this anguish, which will for long
remain unknown, because the whole world condemns it, while sentiment
cherishes it, and the conscience of a true woman justifies her in it.
It is with such pain as with children steadily disowned of life, and
therefore bound more closely to the mother's heart than other children
more bounteously endowed. Never, perhaps, was the awful catastrophe in
which the whole world without dies for us, so deadly, so complete, so
cruelly aggravated by circumstance as it had been for the Marquise.
The man whom she had loved was young and generous; in obedience to the
laws of the world, she had refused herself to his love, and he had
died to save a woman's honor, as the world calls it. To whom could she
speak of her misery? Her tears would be an offence against her
husband, the origin of the tragedy. By all laws written and unwritten
she was bound over to silence. A woman would have enjoyed the story; a
man would have schemed for his own benefit. No; such grief as hers can
only weep freely in solitude and in loneliness; she must consume her
pain or be consumed by it; die or kill something within her--her
conscience, it may be.

Day after day she sat gazing at the flat horizon. It lay out before
her like her own life to come. There was nothing to discover, nothing
to hope. The whole of it could be seen at a glance. It was the visible
presentment in the outward world of the chill sense of desolation
which was gnawing restlessly at her heart. The misty mornings, the
pale, bright sky, the low clouds scudding under the gray dome of
heaven, fitted with the moods of her soul-sickness. Her heart did not