She ascended three or four riven stone steps, and seated herself on some ruined fragments beyond them, full in the sunshine.  The place she had chosen had once been the entrance to the church.  In centuries long gone by, the stream of human sin and human suffering had flowed, day after day, to the confessional, over the place where she now sat.  Of all the miserable women who had trodden those old stones in the bygone time, no more miserable creature had touched them than the woman whose feet rested on them now.

Her hands trembled as she placed them on either side of her, to support herself on the stone seat.  She laid them on her lap; they trembled there.  She held them out, and looked at them wonderingly; they trembled as she looked.  “Like an old woman!” she said, faintly, and let them drop again at her side.

For the first time, that morning, the cruel discovery had forced itself on her mind—­the discovery that her strength was failing her, at the time when she had most confidently trusted to it, at the time when she wanted it most.  She had felt the surprise of Mr. Bartram’s unexpected departure, as if it had been the shock of the severest calamity that could have befallen her.  That one check to her hopes—­a check which at other times would only have roused the resisting power in her to new efforts—­had struck her with as suffocating a terror, had prostrated her with as all-mastering a despair, as if she had been overwhelmed by the crowning disaster of expulsion from St. Crux.  But one warning could be read in such a change as this.  Into the space of little more than a year she had crowded the wearing and wasting emotions of a life.  The bountiful gifts of health and strength, so prodigally heaped on her by Nature, so long abused with impunity, were failing her at last.

She looked up at the far faint blue of the sky.  She heard the joyous singing of birds among the ivy that clothed the ruins.  Oh the cold distance of the heavens!  Oh the pitiless happiness of the birds!  Oh the lonely horror of sitting there, and feeling old and weak and worn, in the heyday of her youth!  She rose with a last effort of resolution, and tried to keep back the hysterical passion swelling at her heart by moving and looking about her.  Rapidly and more rapidly she walked to and fro in the sunshine.  The exercise helped her, through the very fatigue that she felt from it.  She forced the rising tears desperately back to their sources; she fought with the clinging pain, and wrenched it from its hold.  Little by little her mind began to clear again:  the despairing fear of herself grew less vividly present to her thoughts.  There were reserves of youth and strength in her still to be wasted; there was a spirit sorely wounded, but not yet subdued.

She gradually extended the limits of her walk; she gradually recovered the exercise of her observation.