ears of desperation started to her
eyes, as she rose with difficulty. What she most dearly loved seemed
hateful to her now--her heart was too fall of bitterness even to feel
that an all-seeing God was nigh. Thus Clement found her; when for her
sake he had torn himself with an effort from the spell of so
magnificent a scene.

"I am coming!" he called to her from a distance. "It is lucky that you
did not come with us--the place was so narrow, one false step would
have been enough to kill you. The water falls so far, deep down, and
roars and rushes, and rises again in clouds of spray, it makes one
giddy. Only feel how it has powdered me. But how is this? You are cold
as ice, and your lips are trembling. Come, it was very wrong of me to
leave you sitting out so late in the cold! God forbid that it should
make you ill!"

She suffered herself to be led back in perverse silence. The vicar's
wife was much alarmed at seeing the child's sweet countenance so
distorted and disturbed. They prepared some warm drink for her in
haste, and made her go to bed without being able to learn more than
that she felt unwell.

And in truth she did feel ill--so ill that she wished to die. Life
that had already proved itself so adverse, had also become odious to
her. She lay there, giving full vent to her impious rancorous
thoughts, wilfully destroying the last links that bound her to her
fellow-creatures. "I will go up there to-morrow;" she said to herself,
in her dark brooding. "He himself shall take me to the spot where one
false step may kill me. My death will not kill him. Why should he have
to bear my burden longer?--he has only borne it out of pity."

This guilty thought wound close and closer round her heart. What had
become of her natural disposition, so tender and transparent, during
those last few months of inward struggle? She even dwelt without
remorse on the consequences of her crime. "They will get used to it, as
they have got used to my being blind; he will not always have the
picture of my misery before his eyes, to spoil his pleasure in this
beautiful world of his!" This last reflexion invariably came to
strengthen her resolves, when a doubt would arise to combat them.

The vicar and his wife were in the adjoining room, separated from hers
by a thin partition. Clement still lingered out of doors, under the
trees; he could not part from the stars and mountains, or shut out the
distant music of the waters.

"It distresses m