“That, then, it is to have married unhappily,” she said to herself.  She seemed to have gazed into some terrible abyss.

Her friend’s sorrows continued to occupy her thoughts as she sat by her aunt’s bedside; and when at last her feelings of compassion had calmed down, another point in their conversation that had been hitherto thrown into the background came into increasing prominence.  It lay in the words that had so suddenly and grievously wounded her.

“So, that is what the world says of us,” she thought:  “that our marriage has been unhappy.”

She had time and solitude enough, while tending her patient and sitting up with her, to ponder the matter; and as she thought over her married life, and contemplated unflinchingly the constant, weary, fruitless struggle in which it had passed, and in which she had not advanced one single step, but rather had been going always, always back, more and more, she asked herself, could she say that there was happiness in a life like that?  And was Salve himself happy?  She saw him before her as he was in his early youth, and as he was now—­gloomy, savage, and suspicious in his home; she thought how she welcomed him always with disguised dread instead of with a wife’s joy, how they had last parted, and what feelings she had since entertained; and she dwelt long and bitterly upon the contrast.  To think that it should have come to this between them!  She began with dread to reflect, “Perhaps this is what they mean by an unhappy marriage.”  It had never occurred to her before that such a thing could be said of her—­of her, who had married the man whom of all others in the whole world she wished to marry.

She sat on far into the night with her hands folded on her knee, and gazing straight before her, the night-light from the glass behind the bed throwing its faint light over the room.  Fru Beck’s words, as she stood there so pale, and told her of her unhappiness, recurred to her again and again, more distinctly, it seemed, each time.  “I am dying every day.  I know best myself how much is left of me.  It is very little, and will soon be less.”

It seemed then all in a moment to flash upon her—­

“That is just how Salve and I are living.  We are wasting away—­we are dying every day beside each other.  That is what people do who are unhappily married.”

She sat for a long while, with her head bent forward, sorrowfully engrossed with this thought.  In all the self-sacrifice she had practised, because she thought he could not bear to hear the truth, she saw now nothing but one long corroding lie.  It was owing to the want of confidence in each other, of mutual candour—­to their both having shunned the truth, the only sure ground of happiness, that their life together had been thus spoilt.  She threw back her head with a look of wild energy in her face, and never had she looked more handsome than now, as she exclaimed decisively—­