some after-glow more beautiful from the impending night.

I remember--how should I not remember?--the time when that dependence and
hope utterly left me, when the sadness I had felt in Bertha's growing
estrangement became a joy that I looked back upon with longing as a man
might look back on the last pains in a paralysed limb. It was just after
the close of my father's last illness, which had necessarily withdrawn us
from society and thrown us more on each other. It was the evening of
father's death. On that evening the veil which had shrouded Bertha's
soul from me--had made me find in her alone among my fellow-beings the
blessed possibility of mystery, and doubt, and expectation--was first
withdrawn. Perhaps it was the first day since the beginning of my
passion for her, in which that passion was completely neutralized by the
presence of an absorbing feeling of another kind. I had been watching by
my father's deathbed: I had been witnessing the last fitful yearning
glance his soul had cast back on the spent inheritance of life--the last
faint consciousness of love he had gathered from the pressure of my hand.
What are all our personal loves when we have been sharing in that supreme
agony? In the first moments when we come away from the presence of
death, every other relation to the living is merged, to our feeling, in
the great relation of a common nature and a common destiny.

In that state of mind I joined Bertha in her private sitting-room. She
was seated in a leaning posture on a settee, with her back towards the
door; the great rich coils of her pale blond hair surmounting her small
neck, visible above the back of the settee. I remember, as I closed the
door behind me, a cold tremulousness seizing me, and a vague sense of
being hated and lonely--vague and strong, like a presentiment. I know
how I looked at that moment, for I saw myself in Bertha's thought as she
lifted her cutting grey eyes, and looked at me: a miserable ghost-seer,