had been only languid preferences developed in an hour to little less than attachments, and dislikes softened to pity.  The girls who gave promise of beauty and tenderness she looked upon with the eyes of a sister; their lot it would be to know the ecstasy of whispered vows, to give and to receive that happiness which is not to be named lest the gods become envious.  Voices singing together in the class practice which had ever been a weariness, stirred her to a passion of delight; it was the choral symphony of love’s handmaidens.  Did they see a change in her?  Emily fancied that the elder girls looked at each other and smiled and exchanged words in an undertone—­about her.

It was well to have told Wilfrid all her secrets, yet in the impatience of waiting she had tremors of misgiving; would he, perchance, think as she so long had thought, that to speak to anyone, however near, of that bygone woe and shame was a sin against the pieties of nature, least of all excusable when committed at the bidding of her own desires?  He would never breathe to her a word which could reveal such a thought, but Wilfrid, with his susceptibility to the beautiful in character, his nature so intensely in sympathy with her own, might more or less consciously judge her to have fallen from fidelity to the high ideal.  Could he have learnt the story of her life, she still persevering on her widowed way, would he not have deemed her nobler?  Aid against this subtlety of conscience rose in the form of self-reproof administered by that joyous voice of nature which no longer timidly begged a hearing, but came as a mandate from an unveiled sovereign.  With what right, pray, did she desire to show in Wilfrid’s eyes as other than she was?  That part in life alone becomes us which is the very expression of ourselves.  What merit can there be in playing the votary of an ascetic conviction when the heart is bursting with its stifled cry for light and warmth, for human joy, for the golden fruit of the tree of life?  She had been sincere in her renunciation; the way of worthiness was to cherish a sincerity as complete now that her soul flamed to the bliss which fate once more offered her.

The hours passed slowly; how long the night would be if Wilfrid neither wrote to her nor came.  But he had written; at eight o’clock the glad signal of the postman drew her to the door of her room where she stood trembling whilst someone went to the letter-box, and—­oh, joy! ascended the stairs.  It was her letter; because her hands were too unsteady to hold it for reading, she knelt by a chair, like a child with a new picture-book, and spread the sheet open.  And, having read it twice, she let her face fall upon her palms, to repeat to herself the words which danced fire-like b re her darkened eyes.  He wrote rather sadly, but she would not have had it otherwise, for the sadness was of love’s innermost heart, which is the shrine of mortality.

As Emily knelt thus by the chair there came another knock at the house-door, the knock of a visitor.  She did not hear it, nor yet the tap at her own door which followed.  She was startled to consciousness by her landlady’s voice.