generosity of her lover. In this appreciation there was not the faintest
glows of gratitude. She left herself wholly out of the account as only
one could do with whom wretchedness has abolished for the time all
interest in self. She was personally past being benefited. Her sense of
his love and generosity was as disinterested as if some other person had
been their object. Her admiration was such as one feels for a hero of
history or fiction.

Often, when all within her seemed growing hard and still and dead, she
felt that crying would make her feel better. At such times, to help her
to cry, for the tears did not flow easily, she would sit down to the
piano, the only times she ever touched it, and play over some of the
simple airs associated with her life at home. Sometimes, after playing
and crying a while, she would lapse into sweetly mournful day-dreams of
how happy she might have been if she had returned Henry's love in those
old days. She wondered in a puzzled way why it was that she had not. It
seemed so strange to her now that she could have failed in doing so. But
all this time it was only as a might-have-been that she thought of loving
him, as one who feels himself mortally sick thinks of what he might have
done when he was well, as a life-convict thinks of what he might have
done when free, as a disembodied spirit might think of what it might have
done when living. The consciousness of her disgrace, ever with her, had,
in the past month or two, built up an impassable wall between her past
life and her present state of existence. She no longer thought of herself
in the present tense, still less the future.

He had not kissed her since that kiss at their first interview, which
threw her into such a paroxysm of weeping. But one evening, when she had
been more silent and dull than usual, and more unresponsive to his
efforts to interest her, as he rose to go he drew her a moment to his