Tea was brought in, but she paid no heed to it.  Sunset and twilight came; the room grew dusk; then the servants appeared with lamps.  She dined, returned to the drawing room, and took up a book she had been reading on her journey.  It was a volume of Quinet, and insensibly its interest concentrated her attention.  She read for nearly two hours.

Then she was tired of it, and began to move restlessly about.  Again she grew impatient of the uncertainty whether Reuben would return to-night.  She lay upon a couch and tried to forget herself in recollection of far-off places and people.  But instead of the pictures she wished to form, there kept coming before her mind the repulsive photograph which Mrs. Travis had produced.  Though she had barely glanced at it, she saw it distinctly—­the tawdry costume, the ignoble attitude, the shameless and sordid face.  It polluted her imagination.

Jealousy, of a woman such as that?  Had she still loved him, she must have broken her heart to think that he could fall so low.  If it had been told her that he was overcome by passion for a woman of some nobleness, she could have heard it with resignation; in that there would have been nothing base.  But the choice he had made would not allow her even the consolation of reflecting that she felt no jealousy; it compelled her to involve him in the scorn, if not in the loathing, with which that portrait inspired her.

That he merely had ceased to love her, what right had she to blame him?  The very word of “blame” was unmeaning in such reference.  In this, at all events, his fatalism had become her own way of thinking.  To talk of controlling love is nonsensical; dead love is dead beyond hope.  But need one sink into a slough of vileness?

At midnight she went to her bedroom.  He would not come now.

Sleep seemed far from her, and yet before the clock struck one she had fallen into a painful slumber.  When she awoke, it was to toss and writhe for hours in uttermost misery.  She could neither sleep nor command a train of thoughts.  At times she sobbed and wailed in her suffering.

No letter arrived in the morning.  She could no longer read, and knew not how to pass the hours.  In some way she must put an end to her intolerable loneliness, but she could not decide how to act.  Reuben might come today; she wished it, that the meeting might be over and done with.

But the long torment of her nerves had caused a change of mood.  She was feverish now, and impatience grew to resentment.  The emotions which were yesterday so dulled began to stir in her heart and brain.  Walking about the room, unable to occupy herself for a moment, she felt as though fetters were upon her; this house had become a prison; her life was that of a captive without hope of release.