desires, that apparition of the motionless veiled form haunted her with access of horror.  If she slept it came into her dreams, and her waking thoughts strove with hideous wilfulness to unmuffle that dead face.  When horror failed, its place was taken by a grief so intense that it shook the fabric of her being.  She had no relapse in health, but convalescence was severed from all its natural joys; she grew stronger only to mourn more passionately.  In imagination she followed her father through the hours of despair which must have ensued on his interview with Dagworthy.  She pictured his struggle between desire to return home, to find comfort among those he loved, and the bitter shame which forbade it.  How had he spent the time?  Did he wander out of the town to lonely places, until daylight failed?  Did he then come back under the shadow of the night, come back all but to the very door of his dwelling, make one last effort to face those within, pass on in blind agony?  Was he on the heath at the very hour when she crossed it to go to Dagworthy’s house?  Oh, had that been his figure which, as she hurried past, she had seen moving in the darkness of the quarry?

A pity which at times grew too vast for the soul to contain absorbed her life, the pity which overwhelms and crushes, which threatens reason.  That he should have lived through long years of the most patient endurance, keeping ever a hope, a faith, so simple-hearted, so void of bitter feeling, so kindly disposed to all men—­only to be vanquished at length by a moment of inexplicable weakness, only to creep aside, and hide his shame, and die.  Her father, whom it was her heart’s longing to tend and cherish through the brighter days of his age—­lying there in his grave, where no voice could reach him, remote for ever from the solace of loving kindness, his death a perpetuation of woe.  The cruelty of fate had exhausted itself; what had the world to show more pitiful than this?

No light ever came to her countenance; no faintest smile ever touched her lips.  Through the hours, through the days, she lay heedless of things around her, solely occupied with the past, with affliction, with remorse.  Had it not been in her power to save him?  A word from her, and at this moment he would have been living in cheerfulness such as he had never known.  She would have had but to turn her head, and his smile would have met her; the rare laugh, so touching to her always, would have become less rare; his struggles would have been over.  She had willed that he should die, had sent him forth relentlessly to his last trial, to his forsaken end.  Without a leave-taking he had gone forth; his last look had been at her blank windows.  That hour was passed into eternity, and with it the better part of her life.