At last, the light of morning quenched the rushlight, and Janet’s thoughts became more and more fragmentary and confused.  She was every moment slipping off the level on which she lay thinking, down, down into some depth from which she tried to rise again with a start.  Slumber was stealing over her weary brain:  that uneasy slumber which is only better than wretched waking, because the life we seemed to live in it determines no wretched future, because the things we do and suffer in it are but hateful shadows, and leave no impress that petrifies into an irrevocable past.

She had scarcely been asleep an hour when her movements became more violent, her mutterings more frequent and agitated, till at last she started up with a smothered cry, and looked wildly round her, shaking with terror.

‘Don’t be frightened, dear Mrs. Dempster,’ said Mrs. Pettifer, who was up and dressing, ’you are with me, your old friend, Mrs. Pettifer.  Nothing will harm you.’

Janet sank back again on her pillow, still trembling.  After lying silent a little while, she said, ’It was a horrible dream.  Dear Mrs. Pettifer, don’t let any one know I am here.  Keep it a secret.  If he finds out, he will come and drag me back again.’

’No, my dear, depend on me.  I’ve just thought I shall send the servant home on a holiday—­I’ve promised her a good while.  I’ll send her away as soon as she’s had her breakfast, and she’ll have no occasion to know you’re here.  There’s no holding servants’ tongues, if you let ’em know anything.  What they don’t know, they won’t tell; you may trust ’em so far.  But shouldn’t you like me to go and fetch your mother?’

‘No, not yet, not yet.  I can’t bear to see her yet.’

’Well, it shall be just as you like.  Now try and get to sleep again.  I shall leave you for an hour or two, and send off Phoebe, and then bring you some breakfast.  I’ll lock the door behind me, so that the girl mayn’t come in by chance.’

The daylight changes the aspect of misery to us, as of everything else.  In the night it presses on our imagination—­the forms it takes are false, fitful, exaggerated; in broad day it sickens our sense with the dreary persistence of definite measurable reality.  The man who looks with ghastly horror on all his property aflame in the dead of night, has not half the sense of destitution he will have in the morning, when he walks over the ruins lying blackened in the pitiless sunshine.  That moment of intensest depression was come to Janet, when the daylight which showed her the walls, and chairs, and tables, and all the commonplace reality that surrounded her, seemed to lay bare the future too, and bring out into oppressive distinctness all the details of a weary life to be lived from day to day, with no hope to strengthen her against that evil habit, which she loathed in retrospect and yet was powerless to resist.  Her husband would never consent to her living away from