them as if they were human beings like herself, and have a great sympathy with their small hopes and aims; but she would not have been led into such a crime if she had cultivated from her infancy upward a consistent self-indulgence, making herself the centre of a world of mean desires and petty gratifications.  And then she thought of the old and beautiful days up in the Lewis, where the young English stranger seemed to approve of her simple ways and her charitable work, and where she was taught to believe that in order to please him she had only to continue to be what she was then.  There was no great gulf of time between that period and this; but what had not happened in the interval?  She had not changed—­at least she hoped she had not changed.  She loved her husband with her whole heart and soul:  her devotion was as true and constant as she herself could have wished it to be when she dreamed of the duties of a wife in the days of her maidenhood.  But all around her was changed.  She had no longer the old freedom—­the old delight in living from day to day—­the active work, and the enjoyment of seeing where she could help and how she could help the people around her.  When, as if by the same sort of instinct that makes a wild animal retain in captivity the habits which were necessary to its existence when it lived in freedom, she began to find out the circumstances of such unfortunate people as were in her neighborhood, some little solace was given to her; but these people were not friends to her, as the poor folk of Borvabost had been.  She knew, too, that her husband would be displeased if he found her talking with a washerwoman over her family matters, or even advising one of her own servants about the disposal of her wages; so that, while she concealed nothing from him, these things nevertheless had to be done exclusively in his absence.  And was she in so doing really making herself ridiculous?  Did he consider her ridiculous?  Or was it not merely the false and enervating influences of the indolent society in which he lived that had poisoned his mind, and drawn him away from her as though into another world?

Alas! if he were in this other world, was not she quite alone?  What companionship was there possible between her and the people in this new and strange land into which she had ventured?  As she lay on the bed, with her head hidden down in the darkness, the pathetic wail of the captive Jews seemed to come and go through the bitterness of her thoughts, like some mournful refrain:  “By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down; yea we wept when we remembered Zion.”  She almost heard the words, and the reply that rose up in her heart was a great yearning to go back to her own land, so that her eyes were filled with tears in thinking of it, and she lay and sobbed there in the dusk.  Would not the old man living all by himself in that lonely island be glad to see his little girl back again in the old house?  And she would sing to him as she used to sing, not as