For this she had dared everything, had made the supreme sacrifice.  Conscience had nothing to say to her, but she felt herself an outcast even among these wretched toilers whose swarming aroused her disgust.  Given the success which had been all but in her grasp, and triumphant pride would have scored out every misgiving as to the cost at which the victory had been won.  Her pride was unbroken; under the stress of anguish it became a scorn for goodness and humility; but in the desolation of her future she read a punishment equal to the daring wherewith she had aspired.  Excepting her poor old father, not a living soul that held account of her.  She might live for years and years.  Her father would die, and then no smallest tribute of love or admiration would be hers for ever.  More than that; perforce she must gain her own living, and in doing so she must expose herself to all manner of insulting wonder and pity.  Was it a life that could be lived?

Hour after hour she sat with her face buried in her hands.  She did not weep; tears were trivial before a destiny such as this.  But groans and smothered cries often broke the silence of her solitude—­cries of frenzied revolt, wordless curses.  Once she rose up suddenly, passed through the middle room, and out on to the staircase; there a gap in the wall, guarded by iron railings breast-high, looked down upon the courtyard.  She leaned forward over the bar and measured the distance that separated her from the ground; a ghastly height!  Surely one would not feel much after such a fall?  In any case, the crashing agony of but an instant.  Had not this place tempted other people before now?

Some one coming upstairs made her shrink back into her room, She had felt the horrible fascination of that sheer depth, and thought of it for days, thought of it until she dreaded to quit the tenement, lest a power distinct from will should seize and hurl her to destruction.  She knew that that must not happen here; for all her self-absorption, she could not visit with such cruelty the one heart that loved her.  And thinking of him, she understood that her father’s tenderness was not wholly the idle thing that it had been to her at first; her love could never equal his, had never done so in her childhood, but she grew conscious of a soothing power in the gentle and timid devotion with which he tended her.  His appearance of an evening was something more than a relief after the waste of hours which made her day.  The rough, passionate man made himself as quiet and sympathetic as a girl when he took his place by her.  Compared with her, his other children were as nothing to him.  Impossible that Clara should not be touched by the sense that he who had everything to forgive, whom she had despised and abandoned, behaved now as one whose part it is to beseech forgiveness.  She became less impatient when he tried to draw her into conversation; when he hold her thin soft hand in those rude ones of his, she knew a solace in which there was something of gratitude.