and only to be torn away from her, by tearing life away from her.

'Eleven years she had lived in the dark house and its gloomy
garden. He was jealous of the very light and air getting to her,
and they kept her close. He stopped the wide chimneys, shaded the
little windows, left the strong-stemmed ivy to wander where it
would over the house-front, the moss to accumulate on the untrimmed
fruit-trees in the red-walled garden, the weeds to over-run its
green and yellow walks. He surrounded her with images of sorrow
and desolation. He caused her to be filled with fears of the place
and of the stories that were told of it, and then on pretext of
correcting them, to be left in it in solitude, or made to shrink
about it in the dark. When her mind was most depressed and fullest
of terrors, then, he would come out of one of the hiding-places
from which he overlooked her, and present himself as her sole
resource.

'Thus, by being from her childhood the one embodiment her life
presented to her of power to coerce and power to relieve, power to
bind and power to loose, the ascendency over her weakness was
secured. She was twenty-one years and twenty-one days old, when he
brought her home to the gloomy house, his half-witted, frightened,
and submissive Bride of three weeks.

'He had dismissed the governess by that time--what he had left to
do, he could best do alone--and they came back, upon a rain night,
to the scene of her long preparation. She turned to him upon the
threshold, as the rain was dripping from the porch, and said:

'"O sir, it is the Death-watch ticking for me!"