She did not consider now whether Bates’s suffering had been of his own making or hers.  She was not now engaged in an exercise of repentance; compunction, if she felt it, came to her in a nervous tremor, a sob, a tear, not in intelligible thought.  Her memory gave her pictures, and the rest was feeling—­dumb, even within.  She crouched upon the floor and leaned her head against the bedside.  Dry, trembling sobs came at intervals, passing over her as if some outside force had shaken and left her again; and sometimes, in the quiet of the interval, her lips smiled, but the darkness was around.  Then, at length, came tranquillity.  Her imagination, which had been strained to work at the bidding of memory, in weariness released itself from hard reality, and in a waking dream, touched, no doubt, into greater vividness by hovering hands of Sleep, she found temporary rest.  Dreams partake of reality in that that which is and that which might be, are combined in their semblance of life.  Eliza saw the home she had so long hated and lived its life once more, but with this difference, that she, her new present self, was there, and into the old life she brought perforce what knowledge of the world’s refinements she had gained in her year of freedom.  The knowledge seemed to her much more important than it was, but such as it was, she saw it utilised in the log house, and the old way of life thereby changed, but changed the more because she, she the child Sissy, reigned there now as a queen.  It was this idea of reigning, of power, that surely now made this dream—­wild, impossible as she still felt it to be—­pleasant.  But, as she pondered, arranging small details as a stimulated imagination is wont to do, she became gradually conscious that if love were to reign long, the queen of love would be not only queen but slave, and, as by the inevitable action of a true balance, the slave of love would be a ruler too.  This new conception, as it at first emerged, was not disagreeable.  Her imagination worked on, mapping out days and months to her fascinated heart.  Then Sleep came nearer, and turned the self-ordered dream into that which the dreamer mistook for reality.  In that far-off home she saw all the bareness and roughness of the lonely life which, do what she would, she could not greatly alter; and there again Bates kissed her; she felt his touch in all its reality, and in her dream she measured the barrenness of the place against the knowledge that her love was his life.

The soul that lay dreaming in this way was the soul of a heavy-limbed, ungracious woman.  She lay now on the floor in ungainly attitude, and all the things that were about her in the darkness were of that commonest type with which ignorance with limited resource has essayed to imitate some false ideal of finery, and produced such articles as furniture daubed with painted flowers, jute carpets, and gowns beflounced and gaudy.  Yet this soul, shut off from the world now by the curtain of sleep, was spoken to by an angel who blended his own being into recollections of the day, and treated with her concerning the life that is worthy and the life that is vain.