Did it mean that?  Was this the thought that she had dreaded to face throughout the day?  Was it not only her father whose ruin was involved, and must she too bid farewell to hope?

She let those ghastly eyes stare from the darkness into her own, and tried to exhaust their horror.  It overtaxed her courage with a smothered cry of fear she sprang upright, and her shaking hands struck a flame to bring light into the room.  Not once, but again and again, did the chill of terror pass through her whole frame.  She caught a passing glimpse of her image in the glass, and was fascinated into regarding it closely.  ’You, who stand there in the pitiless night’—­thus did thought speak within her—­’you, poor human thing, with the death-white face and eyes staring in all but distraction, is this the very end of the rapturous dream which has lulled you whilst destiny wrought your woe?  Is it even now too late to struggle?  Is this the wild sorrow of farewell to love, the beginning of an anguish which shall torture your soul to death?  Have you lost him?’ For moments it was as though life fought with the last and invincible enemy.  On the spot where she had been standing she sank powerless to her knees, clinging to the nearest object, her head falling back.

The clock outside her door struck one; how long the dull vibration seemed to endure.  She was conscious of it, though lying with all but palsied faculties.  It was the first of the divisions which marked her long vigil; the hours succeeded each other quickly; between voice and voice there seemed to pass but a single wave of surging thought.  But each new warning of coming day found her nearer the calm of resolve.

Look at this girl, and try to know her.  Emily knew but one article of religion, and that bade her preserve, if need be, at the cost of life, the purity of her soul.  This was the supreme law of her being.  The pieties of kindred were as strong in her as in any heart that ever beat, but respect for them Could not constrain her to a course which opposed that higher injunction.  Growing with her growth, nourished by the substance which developed her intellectual force, a sense of all that was involved in her womanhood had conic to be the guiding principle of her existence.  Imagine the great artist Nature bent upon the creation of a soul which should hold in subtlest perfection of consciousness every element essential to the successive ideals of maiden, wife, mother, and the soul of this girl is pictured.  Her religion of beauty was the symbolic expression of instincts wholly chaste; her body was to her a temple which preserved a sacred flame, and she could not conceive existence if once the shrine had suffered desecration.  We are apt to attribute to women indiscriminately at least the outlines of this consciousness; for the vast majority it confuses itself with the prescriptions of a traditional dogma, if not with the mere prejudice of social usage.  For Emily no external dogma existed, and the tenor