thought!  And she could confide in no one.  She was incapable of showing a wound.  Quarter had succeeded quarter, and Gerald Scales was no more heard of.  She had sacrificed her life for worse than nothing.  She had made her own tragedy.  She had killed her father, cheated and shamed herself with a remorse horribly spurious, exchanged content for misery and pride for humiliation—­and with it all, Gerald Scales had vanished!  She was ruined.

She took to religion, and her conscientious Christian virtues, practised with stern inclemency, were the canker of the family.  Thus a year and a half had passed.

And then, on this last day of the year, the second year of her shame and of her heart’s widowhood, Mr. Scales had reappeared.  She had gone casually into the shop and found him talking to her mother and Mr. Povey.  He had come back to the provincial round and to her.  She shook his hand and fled, because she could not have stayed.  None had noticed her agitation, for she had held her body as in a vice.  She knew the reason neither of his absence nor of his return.  She knew nothing.  And not a word had been said at meals.  And the day had gone and the night come; and now she was in chapel, with Constance by her side and Gerald Scales in her soul!  Happy beyond previous conception of happiness!  Wretched beyond an unutterable woe!  And none knew!  What was she to pray for?  To what purpose and end ought she to steel herself?  Ought she to hope, or ought she to despair?  “O God, help me!” she kept whispering to Jehovah whenever the heavenly vision shone through the wrack of her meditation.  “O God, help me!” She had a conscience that, when it was in the mood for severity, could be unspeakably cruel to her.

And whenever she looked, with dry, hot eyes, through her gloved fingers, she saw in front of her on the wall a marble tablet inscribed in gilt letters, the cenotaph!  She knew all the lines by heart, in their spacious grandiloquence; lines such as: 

Ever ready with his tongue his Pen and his purse to help the church of his fathers in her he lived and in her he died cherishing A deep and ardent affection for his beloved faith and creed.

And again: 

His sympathies extended beyond his own community he was always to the Fore in good works and he served the circuit the town and the district with great acceptance and usefulness.

Thus had Mr. Critchlow’s vanity been duly appeased.