For some time the day went pleasantly enough.  She had plenty to do as mistress of the house, and in entertaining the new friends who came to see her.  After a while, when the novelty had worn off, the old insuperable feeling of monotony returned, more particularly in the evening.  Mr. Farrow never went near a public-house, but he never opened a book, and during the winter, when the garden was closed, amused himself with an accordion, or in practising his part in a catch, or in cutting with a penknife curious little wooden chairs and tables.  This mode of passing the time was entertaining enough to him, but not so to Miriam, who was fatally deficient, as so many of her countrymen and countrywomen are, in that lightness which distinguishes the French or the Italians, and would have enabled her, had she been so fortunately endowed with it, to sit by the fire and prattle innocently to her husband, whatever he might be doing.  When she came to her new abode and was turning out the corners, she discovered upstairs in a cupboard a number of brown-looking old books, which had not been touched for many a long day.  Amongst them were Rollin’s Ancient History, some of Swift’s Works with pages torn out, doubtless those which some impatiently clean creature had justly considered too filthy for perusal.  There were also Paul and Virginia, Dryden’s Virgil, Robinson Crusoe, and above all a Shakespeare.  Miriam had never been much of a reader; but now, having nothing better to do, she looked into these books, and generally brought one downstairs in the afternoon.  Swift she did not quite understand, and he frightened her; she never, in fact, got through anything but Gulliver and the Tale of a Tub; but some of his sayings stuck to her and came up against her again and again, until, like most of us who have had even a glimpse of the dark and dreadful caverns in that man’s soul, she wished that he had never been born.  For years, even to the day of her death, the poison of one sentence in the Tale of a Tub remained with her—­those memorable words that “happiness is a perpetual possession of being well deceived.”  Yet she pitied him; who does not pity him?  Who is there in English history who excites and deserves profounder pity?

Of all her treasures, however, the one which produced the deepest impression on her was “Romeo and Juliet.”  She saw there the possibilities of love.  For the first time she became fully aware of what she could have been.  One evening she sat as in a trance.  Cowfold had departed; she was on the balcony in Verona, Romeo was below.  She leaned over and whispered to him—­

  “My bounty is as boundless as the sea,
  My love as deep:  the more I give to thee,
  The more I have, for both are infinite.”

She went on; the day was breaking; she heard the parting—­

  “Farewell! farewell! one kiss and I’ll descend,”

Her arms were round his neck with an ecstasy of passion; he was going; the morning star was flashing before the sun, and she cried after him—­