She was struck with a dryness, a numbness, that appalled her.  She tried still to soothe and comfort, but nothing that she said went home—­took hold.  Between the feeling in her heart which might have reached and touched this despair, and the woman before her, there seemed to be a barrier she could not break.  Or was it that she was really barren and poor in soul, and had never realised it before?  A strange misery rose in her too, as she still knelt, tending and consoling, but with no efficacy—­no power.

At last Mrs. Vincent sank into miserable quiet again.  The mother came in, and silently began to put the children to bed.  Marcella pressed the wife’s cold hand, and went out hanging her head.  She had just reached the door when it opened, and a man entered.  A thrill passed through her at the sight of his honest, haggard face, and this time she found what to say.

“I have been sitting by your wife, Mr. Vincent.  She is very ill and miserable, and very penitent.  You will be kind to her?”

The husband looked at her, and then turned away.

“God help us!” he said; and Marcella went without another word, and with that same wild, unaccustomed impulse of prayer rilling her being which had first stirred in her at Mellor at the awful moment of Hurd’s death.

* * * * *

She was very silent and distracted at tea, and afterwards—­saying that she must write some letters and reports—­she shut herself up, and bade good-night to Minta and the children.

But she did not write or read.  She hung at the window a long time, watching the stars come out, as the summer light died from the sky, and even the walls and roofs and chimneys of this interminable London spread out before her took a certain dim beauty.  And then, slipping down on the floor, with her head against a chair—­an attitude of her stormy childhood—­she wept with an abandonment and a passion she had not known for years.  She thought of Mrs. Jervis—­the saint—­so near to death, so satisfied with “grace,” so steeped in the heavenly life; then of the poor sinner she had just left and of the agony she had no power to stay.  Both experiences had this in common—­that each had had some part in plunging her deeper into this darkness of self-contempt.

What had come to her?  Daring the past weeks there had been something wrestling in her—­some new birth—­some “conviction of sin,” as Mrs. Jervis would have said.  As she looked back over all her strenuous youth she hated it.  What was wrong with her?  Her own word to Anthony Craven returned upon her, mocked her—­made now a scourge for her own pride, not a mere, measure of blame for others.  Aldous Raeburn, her father and mother, her poor—­one and all rose against her—­plucked at her—­reproached her.  “Aye! what, indeed, are wealth and poverty?” cried a voice, which was the voice of them all; “what are opinions—­what is influence, beauty, cleverness?—­what is anything worth but character—­but soul?”