of the hour, and then Dahlia faltered and huddled herself up like a creature swept by the torrent; Rhoda learnt that, instead of hate or loathing of the devilish man who had deceived her, love survived.  Upon Dahlia’s lips it was compassion and forgiveness; but Rhoda, in her contempt for the word, called it love.  Dahlia submitted gladly to the torture of interrogation; “Do you, can you care for him still?” and sighed in shame and fear of her sister, not daring to say she thought her harsh, not daring to plead for escape, as she had done with Robert.

“Why is there no place for the unhappy, who do not wish to live, and cannot die?” she moaned.

And Rhoda cruelly fixed her to the marriage, making it seem irrevocable, and barring all the faint lights to the free outer world, by praise of her—­passionate praise of her—­when she confessed, that half inanimate after her recovery from the fever, and in the hope that she might thereby show herself to her father, she had consented to devote her life to the only creature who was then near her to be kind to her.  Rhoda made her relate how this man had seen her first, and how, by untiring diligence, he had followed her up and found her.  “He—­he must love you,” said Rhoda; and in proportion as she grew more conscious of her sister’s weakness, and with every access of tenderness toward her, she felt that Dahlia must be thought for very much as if she were a child.

Dahlia tried to float out some fretting words for mercy, on one or other of her heavy breathings; but her brain was under lead.  She had a thirst for Rhoda’s praise in her desolation; it was sweet, though the price of it was her doing an abhorred thing.  Abhorred?  She did not realize the consequences of the act, or strength would have come to her to wrestle with the coil:  a stir of her blood would have endued her with womanly counsel and womanly frenzy; nor could Rhoda have opposed any real vehemence of distaste to the union on Dahlia’s part.  But Dahlia’s blood was frozen, her brain was under lead.  She clung to the poor delight in her sister’s praise, and shuddered and thirsted.  She caught at the minutes, and saw them slip from her.  All the health of her thoughts went to establish a sort of blind belief that God; having punished her enough, would not permit a second great misery to befall her.  She expected a sudden intervention, even though at the altar.  She argued to herself that misery, which follows sin, cannot surely afflict us further when we are penitent, and seek to do right:  her thought being, that perchance if she refrained from striving against the current, and if she suffered her body to be borne along, God would be the more merciful.  With the small cunning of an enfeebled spirit, she put on a mute submissiveness, and deceived herself by it sufficiently to let the minutes pass with a lessened horror and alarm.

This was in the first quarter of the night.  The dawn was wearing near.  Sedgett had been seen by Rhoda; a quiet interview; a few words on either side, attention paid to them by neither.  But the girl doated on his ugliness; she took it for plain proof of his worthiness; proof too that her sister must needs have seen the latter very distinctly, or else she could not have submitted.