Whatever this night had been to the girl, it left one thought
sharp, alive, in the exhausted quiet of her brain: a cowardly
dread of the trial of the day, when she would see him again. Was
the old struggle of years before coming back? Was it all to go
over again? She was worn out. She had been quiet in these two
years: what had gone before she never looked back upon; but it
made her thankful for even this stupid quiet. And now, when she
had planned her life, busy, useful, contented, why need God have
sent the old thought to taunt her? A wild, sickening sense of
what might have been struggled up: she thrust it down,-- she had
kept it down all night; the old pain should not come back,--it
should not. She did not think of the love she had given up as a
dream, as verse-makers or sham people do; she knew it to be the
quick seed of her soul. She cried for it even now, with all the
fierce strength of her nature; it was the best she knew; through
it she came nearest to God. Thinking of the day when she had
given it up, she remembered it with a vague consciousness of
having fought a deadly struggle with her fate, and that she had
been conquered,--never had lived again. Let it be; she could not
bear the struggle again.

She went on dressing herself in a dreary, mechanical way. Once,
a bitter laugh came on her face, as she looked into the glass,
and saw the dead, dull eyes, and the wrinkle on her forehead.
Was that the face to be crowned with delicate caresses and love?
She scorned herself for the moment, grew sick of herself, balked,
thwarted in her true life as she was. Other women whom God has
loved enough to probe to the depths of their nature have done the
same,--saw themselves as others saw them: their strength drying