I have said that Dorothy wondered she did not fall ill.  There was a hope in Juliet’s mind of which she had not spoken, but upon which, though vaguely, she built further hope, and which may have had part in her physical endurance:  the sight of his baby might move the heart of her husband to pardon her!

But the time, even with the preoccupation of misery, grew very dreary.  She had never had any resources in herself except her music, and even if here she had had any opportunity of drawing upon that, what is music but a mockery to a breaking heart?  Was music ever born of torture, of misery?  It is only when the cloud of sorrow is sinking in the sun-rays, that the song-larks awake and ascend.  A glory of some sort must fringe the skirts of any sadness, the light of the sorrowing soul itself must be shed upon it, and the cloud must be far enough removed to show the reflected light, before it will yield any of the stuff of which songs are made.  And this light that gathers in song, what is it but hope behind the sorrow—­hope so little recognized as such, that it is often called despair?  It is reviving and not decay that sings even the saddest of songs.

Juliet had had little consciousness of her own being as an object of reflection.  Joy and sorrow came and went; she had never brooded.  Never until now, had she known any very deep love.  Even that she bore her father had not ripened into the grand love of the woman-child.  She forgot quickly; she hoped easily; she had had some courage, and naturally much activity; she faced necessity by instinct, and took almost no thought for the morrow—­but this after the fashion of the birds, not after the fashion required of those who can consider the birds; it is one thing to take no thought, for want of thought, and another to take no thought, from sufficing thought, whose flower is confidence.  The one way is the lovely way of God in the birds—­the other, His lovelier way in his men and women.  She had in her the making of a noble woman—­only that is true of every woman; and it was no truer of her than of every other woman, that, without religion, she could never be, in any worthy sense, a woman at all.  I know how narrow and absurd this will sound to many of my readers, but such simply do not know what religion means, and think I do not know what a woman means.  Hitherto her past had always turned to a dream as it glided away from her; but now, in the pauses of her prime agony, the tide rose from the infinite sea to which her river ran, and all her past was borne back upon her, even to her far-gone childish quarrels with her silly mother, and the neglect and disobedience she had too often been guilty of toward her father.  And the center of her memories was the hot coal of that one secret; around that they all burned and hissed.  Now for the first time her past was, and she cowered and fled from it, a slave to her own history, to her own deeds, to her own concealment.  Alas, like many another