There would have been dead silence in Orchard Street but for the whistling of the wind and the swirling of the March dust on the pavement.  Thick clouds covered the sky; every door was closed; every window was dark.  No ray of light fell on the tall white figure that stood in lonely misery on the doorstep; no eye rested on Janet as she sank down on the cold stone, and looked into the dismal night.  She seemed to be looking into her own blank future.

Chapter 15

The stony street, the bitter north-east wind and darkness—­and in the midst of them a tender woman thrust out from her husband’s home in her thin night-dress, the harsh wind cutting her naked feet, and driving her long hair away from her half-clad bosom, where the poor heart is crushed with anguish and despair.

The drowning man, urged by the supreme agony, lives in an instant through all his happy and unhappy past:  when the dark flood has fallen like a curtain, memory, in a single moment, sees the drama acted over again.  And even in those earlier crises, which are but types of death—­when we are cut off abruptly from the life we have known, when we can no longer expect tomorrow to resemble yesterday, and find ourselves by some sudden shock on the confines of the unknown—­there is often the same sort of lightning-flash through the dark and unfrequented chambers of memory.

When Janet sat down shivering on the door-stone, with the door shut upon her past life, and the future black and unshapen before her as the night, the scenes of her childhood, her youth and her painful womanhood, rushed back upon her consciousness, and made one picture with her present desolation.  The petted child taking her newest toy to bed with her—­the young girl, proud in strength and beauty, dreaming that life was an easy thing, and that it was pitiful weakness to be unhappy—­the bride, passing with trembling joy from the outer court to the inner sanctuary of woman’s life—­the wife, beginning her initiation into sorrow, wounded, resenting, yet still hoping and forgiving—­the poor bruised woman, seeking through weary years the one refuge of despair, oblivion:—­Janet seemed to herself all these in the same moment that she was conscious of being seated on the cold stone under the shock of a new misery.  All her early gladness, all her bright hopes and illusions, all her gifts of beauty and affection, served only to darken the riddle of her life; they were the betraying promises of a cruel destiny which had brought out those sweet blossoms only that the winds and storms might have a greater work of desolation, which had nursed her like a pet fawn into tenderness and fond expectation, only that she might feel a keener terror in the clutch of the panther.  Her mother had sometimes said that troubles were sent to make us better and draw us nearer to God.  What mockery that seemed to Janet! Her troubles had been sinking her lower from year to year,