Grey looked after her.  Strong, useful, stable:  how contented and happy she had been since she was born!  Love, wealth, coming to her as matters of course.  The girl looked out of the dingy window into the wearisome gray sky.  Well, what was the difference between them?  What crime had she committed, that God should have so set His face against her from the first,—­from the very first?  She had trusted Him more than this woman whom He seemed glad to bless.  There were two or three creamy wild-lilies in a broken glass on the sill.  The girl always loved the flower, because Jesus had touched it once:  it brought her near to him, she fancied.  She thought of him now, seeing them, and put her hand to her head:  remembering the nameless agony he had chosen to bear to show her what a true life should be; loving him with that desperate hope with which only a woman undone clings to him upon the cross.  And yet—­

“It’s hard,” she said, turning sullenly away from the window.

Whatever the hours of this past day and night had been to her, they had left one curious mark on her face,—­a hollow sinking of the lines about the mouth, as though years of pain had slowly crept over her.  Suffering had not ennobled her.  It is only heroic, large-brained women, with a great natural grasp of charity, that severe pain lifts out of themselves:  weak souls, like Grey, who starve without daily food of personal love, contract under God’s great judgments, sour into pettish discontent, or grow maudlin as blind devotees, knowing but two things in eternity,—­their own idea of God, and their own salvation.  Nunneries are full of them.  Grey had no vital pith of self-reliance to keep her erect, now that the storm came.  What strength she had was outside:  her childlike grip on the hand of the Man gone before.

“In half an hour.”  She tried to put that thought out, and look at the chamber they had given her last night:  odd enough for a woman; a bare-floored, low-ceiled room, the upper story of the fire-engine house:  the same which they had used as a guard-house; but they had no prisoners now.  From this window where she stood John Brown had defended himself; the marks of bullets were in the walls.  She tried to think of all that had followed that defence, of the four millions of slaves for whom he died, whose friends in the North would convert their masters into their deadly foes, and be slothful in helping them themselves.  She tried to fill up the half-hour thinking of this, but it seemed to her she was more to be pitied than they.  Chained to a man she hated.  Why, more than four millions of women had married as she had done:  society drove them into it.  “In half an hour.”  He was coming then.  She would be calm about it, would bid him good-bye without crying.  He would suffer less then,—­poor Paul!  She had his likeness:  she would give that back.  She drew it from its hiding-place and laid it down:  the eyes looked at hers with a half-laugh:  she turned away quickly to the window, holding herself up by her shaking hands.  If she could keep it to look at,—­at night, sometimes!  She would grow old soon, and in all her life if she had this one little pleasure!