She went to the window, looking blankly out into the gray cold.  Any one with keen analytic eye, noting the thin muscles of this woman, the childish, scarlet lips, the eyes deep, concealing, would have foretold that she would conquer in the trial, that she would force her soul down,—­but that the forcing down would leave the weak, flaccid body spent and dead.  One thing was certain:  no curious eyes would see the struggle; the body might be nerveless or sickly, but it had the great power of reticence; the calm with which she faced the closest gaze was natural to her,—­no mask.  When she left her room and went down, the same unaltered quiet that had baffled Knowles steadied her step and cooled her eyes.

After you have made a sacrifice of yourself for others, did you ever notice how apt you were to doubt, as soon as the deed was irrevocable, whether, after all, it were worth while to have done it?  How poor seems the good gained!  How new and unimagined the agony of empty hands and stifled wish!  Very slow the angels are, sometimes, that are sent to minister!

Margaret, going down the stairs that morning, found none of the chivalric unselfish glow of the night before in her home.  It was an old, bare house in the midst of dreary moors, in which her life was slowly to be worn out:  that was all.  It did not matter; life was short:  she could thank God for that at least.

She opened the house-door.  A draught of cold morning air struck her face, sweeping from the west; it had driven the fog in great gray banks upon the hills, or in shimmering broken swamps into the cleft hollows:  a vague twilight filled the space left bare.  Tiger, asleep in the hall, rushed out into the meadow, barking, wild with the freshness and cold, then back again to tear round her for a noisy good-morning.  The touch of the dog seemed to bring her closer to his master; she put him away; she dared not suffer even that treachery to her purpose:  because, in fact, the very circumstances that had forced her to give him up made it weak cowardice to turn again.  It was a simple story, yet one which she dared not tell to herself; for it was not altogether for her father’s sake she had made the sacrifice.  She knew, that, though she might be near to this man Holmes as his own soul, she was a clog on him,—­stood in his way,—­kept him back.  So she had quietly stood aside, taken up her own solitary burden, and left him with his clear self-reliant life,—­with his Self, dearer to him than she had ever been.  Why should it not be? she thought,—­remembering the man as he was, a master among men.  He was back again; she must see him.  So she stood there with this persistent dread running through her brain.