Then it was that she sought relief in the schemes which naturally occur to a woman thus miserable.  She would relinquish her life as a teacher, and bury her wretchedness beneath physical hardship.  There was anguish enough in the world, and she would go to live in the midst of it, would undertake the hardest and most revolting tasks in some infirmary:  thus might she crush out of herself the weakness which was her disgrace.  It remained only a vision.  That which was terribly real, the waste and woe of her heart, grew ever.

She yielded.  Was not the true sin this that she tried to accomplish—­the slaying of the love which cried so from her inmost being?  Glimpses of the old faith began to be once more vouchsafed her; at moments she knew the joy of beautiful things.  This was in spring-time.  Living in the great seaport, she could easily come within sight of the blue line where heaven and ocean met, and that symbol of infinity stirred once more the yearnings for boundless joy which in bygone days she had taught herself to accept as her creed.  Supposing that her father had still knowledge of the life she led, would it make him happy to know that she had deprived herself of every pleasure, had for his sake ruined a future which might have been so fair?  Not thus do we show piety to the dead; rather in binding our brows with every flower our hands may cull, and in drinking sunlight as long as the west keeps for us one gleam.

She had destroyed herself.  Joy could arise to her from but one source, and that was stopped for ever.  For it never came to Emily as the faintest whisper that other love than Wilfrid’s might bless her life.  That was constancy which nothing could shake; in this she would never fall from the ideal she had set before herself.  She no longer tried to banish thoughts of what she had lost; Wilfrid was a companion at all hours far more real than the people with whom she had to associate.  She had, alas, destroyed his letters she had destroyed the book in which she wrote the secrets of her heart that he might some day read them.  The lack of a single thing that had come to her from him made the more terribly real the severance of his life from hers.  She anguished without hope.

Then there came to her the knowledge that her bodily strength was threatened by disease.  She had fainting fits, and in the comfort administered by those about her she read plainly what was meant to be concealed.  At times this was a relief; at least she might hope to be spared long years of weary desolation, and death, come when he might, would be a friend.  In other hours the all but certainty of her doom was a thought so terrible that reason well-nigh failed before it.  Was there no hope for her for ever, nothing but the grave to rest her tired heart?  Why had fate dealt with her so cruelly?  She looked round and saw none upon whom had fallen a curse so unrelieved.