Such a woman, pure, chaste, and untouched, had been Sally Bishop.  But to one man alone can a woman be this, and then, only so long as she remains with him.  Once he has cast her off, when once she is discarded, she becomes to all who know her, a woman of easy virtue, prey to the first hungry hands that are ready to claim her.  This, in an age when the binding sacrament of matrimony is being held up to ridicule both in theory and in practice, is perhaps the only reasonable argument that can be utilized in its defence.  It is surely not pedantic to hope that the purity of some women is still essential for the race, and it is surely not illogical to suppose that marriage is the means, in such cases as that of Sally Bishop, to this humble end.

Pure, certainly, she had been, even in the eyes of such a man as Devenish; but in the light of a discarded mistress, all her virtue vanished.  Innate in the mind of the worst of men is the timid hesitation before he brands a virtuous woman; but when once he knows that she has fallen, conscience lifts, like a feather on the breeze.  With a light heart, he reaps the harvest of tares which some other than himself must be blamed for sowing, and with a light heart he goes his way, immune to remorse.

This then is the Tragedy which, like some insect in the heart of the rose, had eaten its way into the romance of Sally Bishop.

For three days after Traill had left her, she broke under the flood of her despair.  For those three days she did not move out of her rooms, taking just what nourishment there was to be found in the cupboards where they stored the food for their breakfasts.  On the side of her bed she sometimes sat, biting a dry piece of bread—­anything that she could find—­in that unconscious instinct with which the body prompts the mind for its own preservation.  But these meals—­if such they can be called—­she took at no stated times.  Crusts of bread lay about on the table, showing how indiscriminately of order she had fed herself.  For two hours together, she would sit in awful silence, with eyes strained staringly before her.  Of tears, there were none.  Sometimes a sob broke through her lips when a sound downstairs reminded her of him; but no tears accompanied it.  It was more like the complaining cry of some animal in its sleep.

For the first two nights she just flung herself on her bed when the darkness came.  She did not undress.  The nights were warm then, or cold might have driven her between the clothes.  But, on the third evening, she disrobed.  This was habit reasserting itself.  She did it unconsciously, only remembering as she crept, shuddering, between the sheets, that for the two previous nights she had not gone to bed at all.

The toppling fall of reason would soon have ended it; that merciful potion of magic which can bring a torturing misery in the guise of a quaint conceit to a mind made simple as a little child’s.  Another day or so, and the frightened agony that glittered in her eyes—­fusing slowly towards the last great conflagration—­would have burnt up in the sudden panic-flare as the reason guttered out, then smouldered down into that pitiable lightless flickering where all glimmer of intelligence is dead.