While they thus prayed, kneeling on the stone floor of the little kitchen, dark under the universal canopy of cloud, the rain went on clashing and murmuring all around, rushing from the eaves, and exploding with sharp hisses in the fire, and in the mingled noise they had neither heard a low tap, several times repeated, nor the soft opening of the door that followed.  When they rose from their knees, it was therefore with astonishment they saw a woman standing motionless in the doorway, without cloak or bonnet, her dank garments clinging to her form and dripping with rain.

When Juliet woke that morning, she cared little that the sky was dull and the earth dark.  A selfish sorrow, a selfish love even, makes us stupid, and Juliet had been growing more and more stupid.  Many people, it seems to me, through sorrow endured perforce and without a gracious submission, slowly sink in the scale of existence.  Such are some of those middle-aged women, who might be the very strength of social well-being, but have no aspiration, and hope only downward—­after rich husbands for their daughters, it may be—­a new bonnet or an old coronet—­the devil knows what.

Bad as the weather had been the day before, Dorothy had yet contrived to visit her, and see that she was provided with every necessary; and Juliet never doubted she would come that day also.  She thought of Dorothy’s ministrations as we so often do of God’s—­as of things that come of themselves, for which there is no occasion to be thankful.

When she had finished the other little house-work required for her comfort, a labor in which she found some little respite from the gnawings of memory and the blankness of anticipation, she ended by making up a good fire, though without a thought of Dorothy’s being wet when she arrived, and sitting down by the window, stared out at the pools, spreading wider and wider on the gravel walks beneath her.  She sat till she grew chilly, then rose and dropped into an easy chair by the fire, and fell fast asleep.

She slept a long time, and woke in a terror, seeming to have waked herself with a cry.  The fire was out, and the hearth cold.  She shivered and drew her shawl about her.  Then suddenly she remembered the frightful dream she had had.

She dreamed that she had just fled from her husband and gained the park, when, the moment she entered it, something seized her from behind, and bore her swiftly, as in the arms of a man—­only she seemed to hear the rush of wings behind her—­the way she had been going.  She struggled in terror, but in vain; the power bore her swiftly on, and she knew whither.  Her very being recoiled from the horrible depth of the motionless pool, in which, as she now seemed to know, lived one of the loathsome creatures of the semi-chaotic era of the world, which had survived its kind as well as its coevals, and was ages older than the human race.  The pool appeared—­but not as she had known it, for