fully repossessed herself, had felt herself entangled in his fate by a
hundred meshes of association and habit; but after a sleepless night spent
with the thought of him--that dreadful bridal of their souls--she woke to a
morrow in which he had no part. She had not sought her freedom, nor had he
given it; but a chasm had opened at their feet, and they found themselves
on different sides.

Now she was able to scan the disaster from the melancholy vantage of her
independence. She could even draw a solace from the fact that she had
ceased to love Denis. It was inconceivable that an emotion so interwoven
with every fibre of consciousness should cease as suddenly as the flow of
sap in an uprooted plant; but she had never allowed herself to be tricked
by the current phraseology of sentiment, and there were no stock axioms to
protect her from the truth.

It was probably because she had ceased to love him that she could look
forward with a kind of ghastly composure to seeing him again. She had
stipulated, of course, that the wedding should be put off, but she had
named no other condition beyond asking for two days to herself--two days
during which he was not even to write. She wished to shut herself in with
her misery, to accustom herself to it as she had accustomed herself to
happiness. But actual seclusion was impossible: the subtle reactions of
life almost at once began to break down her defences. She could no more
have her wretchedness to herself than any other emotion: all the lives
about her were so many unconscious factors in her sensations. She tried
to concentrate herself on the thought as to how she could best help poor
Denis; for love, in ebbing, had laid bare an unsuspected depth of pity.
But she found it more and more difficult to consider his situation in the
abstract light of right and wrong. Open expiation still seemed to her the
only possible way of healing; but she tried vainly to think of Mrs. Peyton