How she upbraided herself!—­She had not used her strength; she had not told her mother all her heart.  And yet how could she tell her heart?  How face her mother with such vague suspicions, hardly supported by a single fact?  How argue it out against her like a lawyer, and convict her to her face?  What daughter could do that, who had human love and reverence left in her?  No! to touch her inward witness, as the Quakers well and truly term it, was the only method:  and it had failed.  “God help me!” was her only cry:  but the help did not come yet; there came over her instead a feeling of utter loneliness.  Willis dead; Thurnall gone; her mother estranged; and, like a child lost upon a great moor, she looked round all heaven and earth, and there was none to counsel, none to guide—­ perhaps not even God.  For would He help her as long as she lived in sin?  And was she not living in sin, deadly sin, as long as she knew what she was sure she knew, and left the wrong unrighted?

It is sometimes true, the popular saying, that sunshine comes after storm.  Sometimes true, or who could live? but not always:  not even often.  Equally true is the popular antithet, that misfortunes never come single; that in most human lives there are periods of trouble, blow following blow, wave following wave, from opposite and unexpected quarters, with no natural or logical sequence, till all God’s billows have gone over the soul.

How paltry and helpless, in such dark times, are all theories of mere self-education; all proud attempts, like that of Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister, to hang self-poised in the centre of the abyss, and there organise for oneself a character by means of circumstances!  Easy enough, and graceful enough does that dream look, while all the circumstances themselves—­all which stands around—­are easy and graceful, obliging and commonplace, like the sphere of petty experiences with which Goethe surrounds his insipid hero.  Easy enough it seems for a man to educate himself without God, as long as he lies comfortably on a sofa, with a cup of coffee and a review:  but what if that “daemonic element of the universe,” which Goethe confessed, and yet in his luxuriousness tried to ignore, because he could not explain—­what if that broke forth over the graceful and prosperous student, as it may any moment!  What if some thing, or some person, or many things, or many persons, one after the other (questions which he must get answered then, or die), took him up and dashed him down, again, and again, and again, till he was ready to cry, “I reckoned till morning that like a lion he will break all my bones; from morning till evening he will make an end of me”?  What if he thus found himself hurled perforce amid the real universal experiences of humanity; and made free, in spite of himself, by doubt and fear and horror of great darkness, of the brotherhood of woe, common alike to the simplest peasant-woman, and to every great soul perhaps, who has left his