d prey of circumstance.

As she lay in the long, white room dedicated to those stricken, like
herself, with the disease that feeds on youth, her strength ebbing
away quite painlessly, she often entered upon the pathless little
track of introspection, a pathetic, illogical summing up of the
conduct of her life, which always led so quickly to the same broad
end of reassurance, followed by unreasoned condemnation--the
conventional judgement on her very inability to discover where she
had so gravely sinned, how and when she had earned the extreme
penalty of reprobation and of death. She was too wicked, she
concluded hopelessly, vaguely struggling with the memories of the
teaching of her Sunday-school, too wicked to find out wherein her
exceeding wickedness lay.

One comfort she took to her sad heart, that Rainham had not
condemned her; that he had only pitied her, while he reserved his
damnation for the iron-bound, Sabbatarian world which had ruined and
spurned another helpless victim. Rainham she believed implicitly,
obeyed unquestioningly, with a sense of gratitude which had been
largely mingled with self-reproach, until he had told her that, so
far as he was concerned, she had nothing to reproach herself with.
It never occurred to her for a moment now to question or to resent
the part he had made her play on that tragical afternoon in Grove
Road. Why should she? The imputation of a lie, what was that to her?
Had he not taken it all, all her misery upon himself? Had he not
fed, and clothed, and lodged her like the most penitent of
prodigals, although she had no claim upon him until he chose to give
it to her? Her benefactor could do no wrong, that was her creed; and
it made things wonderfully smooth, the future on a sudden strangely
simple. She had lied to him at the bidding of the other, and he had
not resented it when he came to know the truth: she had brought
shame on him, and he had not reproached her. A man like this was
outside her experience; she regarded him with a kind of grateful
amazement--a wondering veneration, which sometimes held her dumb in
his presence.

If she had felt unhappy at first about the future of her child--and
there had been moments when this thought had been more bitter than
all the rest of her life together--this care was taken from her when
Rainham promised to adopt the little girl, or, better still, to
induce Mrs. Bullen to open her motherly heart to her. "They'll be
only too glad to g