hands, and touched things, and moved them.  The sight was convincing, but the shudder came again.  In a frame less robust the brain would have given way.  It was the very soundness of the brain which, when her blood was a simple tide of life in her veins, and no vital force, had condemned her to see the wisdom and the righteousness of the act of sacrifice committed by her, and had urged her even up to the altar.  Then the sudden throwing off of the mask by that man to whom she had bound herself, and the reading of Edward’s letter of penitence and love, thwarted reason, but without blinding or unsettling it.  Passion grew dominant; yet against such deadly matters on all sides had passion to strive, that, under a darkened sky, visibly chained, bound down, and hopeless, she felt between-whiles veritably that she was a living body buried.  Her senses had become semi-lunatic.

She talked reasonably; and Rhoda, hearing her question and answer at meal-times like a sane woman, was in doubt whether her sister wilfully simulated a partial insanity when they were alone together.  Now, in the garden, Dahlia said:  “All those flowers, my dear, have roots in mother and me.  She can’t feel them, for her soul’s in heaven.  But mine is down there.  The pain is the trying to get your soul loose.  It’s the edge of a knife that won’t cut through.  Do you know that?”

Rhoda said, as acquiescingly as she could, “Yes.”

“Do you?” Dahlia whispered.  “It’s what they call the ‘agony.’  Only, to go through it in the dark, when you are all alone! boarded round! you will never know that.  And there’s an angel brings me one of mother’s roses, and I smell it.  I see fields of snow; and it’s warm there, and no labour for breath.  I see great beds of flowers; I pass them like a breeze.  I’m shot, and knock on the ground, and they bury me for dead again.  Indeed, dearest, it’s true.”

She meant, true as regarded her sensations.  Rhoda could barely give a smile for response; and Dahlia’s intelligence being supernaturally active, she read her sister’s doubt, and cried out,—­

“Then let me talk of him!”

It was the fiery sequence to her foregone speech, signifying that if her passion had liberty to express itself, she could clear understandings.  But even a moment’s free wing to passion renewed the blinding terror within her.  Rhoda steadied her along the walks, praying for the time to come when her friends, the rector and his wife, might help in the task of comforting this poor sister.  Detestation of the idea of love made her sympathy almost deficient, and when there was no active work to do in aid, she was nearly valueless, knowing that she also stood guilty of a wrong.

The day was very soft and still.  The flowers gave light for light.  They heard through the noise of the mill-water the funeral bell sound.  It sank in Rhoda like the preaching of an end that was promise of a beginning, and girdled a distancing land of trouble.  The breeze that blew seemed mercy.  To live here in forgetfulness with Dahlia was the limit of her desires.  Perhaps, if Robert worked among them, she would gratefully give him her hand.  That is, if he said not a word of love.