In a few days she obliged her mother to concede to her a share in the work of the house.  She had nothing of the common feminine interest in such work for its own sake, but it was a pleasure to lessen her mother’s toil.  There was very little converse between them; for evidently they belonged to different worlds.  When Mrs. Hood took her afternoon’s repose, it was elsewhere than in the room where Emily sat, and Emily herself did not seek to alter this habit, knowing that she often, quite involuntarily, caused her mother irritation, and that to reduce their intercourse as far as could be without marked estrangement was the best way to make it endurable to both.  But the evening hours she invariably devoted to her father; the shortness of the time that she was able to give him was a reason for losing no moment of this communion.  She knew that the forecast of the evening’s happiness sustained him through the long day, and even so slight a pleasure as that she bestowed in opening the door at his arrival, she would not willingly have suffered him to lose.  It did not appear that Mrs. Hood reflected on this exclusive attachment in Emily; it certainly troubled her not at all.  This order in the house was of long standing; it had grown to seem as natural as poverty and hopelessness.  Emily and her father reasoned as little about their mutual affection; to both it was a priceless part of life, given to them by the same dark powers that destroy and deprive.  It behoved them to enjoy it while permitted to do so.

Had she known the recent causes of trouble which weighed upon her parents, Emily would scarcely have been able to still keep her secret from them.  The anxiety upon her father’s face and her mother’s ceaseless complaining were too familiar to suggest anything unusual.  She had come home with the resolve to maintain silence, if only because her marriage seemed remote and contingent upon many circumstances; and other reasons had manifested themselves to her even before Wilfrid’s visit.  At any time she would find a difficulty in speaking upon such a subject with her mother; strange though it may sound, the intimacy. between them was not near enough to encourage such a disclosure, with all the explanations it would involve.  Nor yet to her father would she willingly speak of what had happened, until it became necessary to do so.  Emily’s sense of the sanctity of relations such as those between Wilfrid and herself had, through so different a cause, very much the same effects as what we call false shame.  The complex motives of virgin modesty had with her become a conscious sustaining power, a faith; of all beautiful things that the mind could conceive, this mystery was the loveliest, and the least capable of being revealed to others, however near, without desecration.  Perhaps she had been aided in the nurturing of this ideal by her loneliness; no friend had ever tempted her to confidences; her gravest and purest thoughts had never been imparted to any.  Thus she had