Very slowly the night was driven back.  An hour after, when she lifted her head again, the stars were still glittering through the foggy arch, like sparks of brassy blue, and the sky and hills and valleys were one drifting, slow-heaving mass of ashy damp.  Off in the east a stifled red film groped through.  It was another day coming; she might as well get up, and live the rest of her life out;—­what else had she to do?

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 and useful and 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 reality of her life.  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 up within them, jeered at, utterly alone.  It is a trial we laugh at.  I think the quick fagots at the stake were fitter subjects for laughter than the slow gnawing hunger in the heart of many a slighted woman or a selfish man.  They come out of the trial as out of martyrdom, according to their faith:  you see its marks sometimes in a frivolous old age going down with tawdry hopes and starved eyes to the grave; you see its victory in the freshest, fullest lives in the earth.  This woman had accepted her trial, but she took it up as an inflexible fate which she did not understand; it was new to her; its solitude, its hopeless thirst were freshly bitter.  She loathed herself as one whom God had thought unworthy of every woman’s right,—­to love and be loved.