The little creature a day or two after her accident, finding fault with every one about her, and scarcely conscious that her own pain was to blame because they could not please her, had peevishly complained that she wanted Mrs. Nemily.  Mrs. Nemily was a kind lady, and could tell her much prettier stories, and not give her such nasty things to drink.

Emily was instantly made aware of this, but when she arrived her little charge was past noticing any one.  And yet Emily was full of hope.  Impassioned and confiding prayer sustained her courage.  She had always loved the little one keenly, and desired now with indescribable longing that her father might be spared the anguish of parting with her thus.

Yes, there was Emily; John Mortimer saw her move toward the window, and derived some faint comfort from the knowledge that she would be with Anastasia for the night.

Lovely, pale, and calm, he saw and blessed her, but she could not see him; and as she retired she too was added to the measure of his self-reproaches.  He had lost her, and that also he had but himself to thank for; he himself, and no other, was to blame for it all.

He loved her.  Oh yes, he had soon found out that he loved her!  Fool! to have believed that in the early prime of his life the deepest passions of humanity were never to wake up again and assert themselves, because for the moment they had fallen into a noonday sleep.  Fool, doubly fool, to have prided himself on the thought that this was so; and more than all a fool, to have let his scorn of love appear and justify itself to such a woman as Emily.  Lovely and loving, what had he asked of her? which was to be done without the reward of his love.  To bring up for him another woman’s children, to manage a troublesome household, to let him have leisure and leave to go away from her from time to time, that he might pursue his literary tastes and his political destiny, to be responsible, to be contented, and to be lost, name and ambition, in him and his.

All this had flashed across his mind, and amazed him with his own folly, before he reached the town on the morning that he left her.  But that was nothing to the knowledge that so soon followed, the discovery that he loved her.  For the first time in his life it seemed to be his part in creation to look up, and not to look down.  He wrestled with himself, and fought with all his power against this hopeless passion; wondered whether he had done his cause irretrievable mischief by speaking too soon, as well as by speaking amiss; seldom hoped at all, for he had been refused even with indignation; and never was less able to withdraw his thoughts from Emily, even for a moment, than when he felt most strongly that there was no chance for him at all.

Still they went on and on now, his thoughts of her; they gave poignancy to all his other pain.  The place, the arbour where he sat, had become familiar to him of late.  He had become used to wander and pace the garden at night some time before this accident.  Hour after hour, night after night, he had gone over the matter; he had hardly decided to go back to her, and implore her to give him a chance of retrieving his deplored mistake, when she sent him back his ring, and early the next morning was gone.