of love for her husband which duty prompts
in those who are without passion.

"I don't pretend to understand your father," she said to Magdalena. "The
bees he gets in his bonnet are quite beyond me, but if he feels that
way, he does, and that's the end of it; and he makes me feel
uncomfortable all the time I am anywhere. I sha'n't go out again until
he gets over this. You can go with somebody else."

"I would a great deal rather stay home. I don't enjoy myself. People
work so hard to be amused. I'd much rather just sit still and do
nothing."

"You're lazy, like all the Spanish. Well, you'll have to do a good deal
of sitting still, I expect; and in a sick room, I'm afraid. Poor Hiram
looks thinner and greyer every day. Almost all our relations died of
consumption."

"I wrote to aunt how badly he was looking, but she has not answered."

"She won't, the heartless thing. She never loved him. But if he takes to
his bed with slow consumption, she'll have to come up and do her share
of the nursing. She ought to like it. Fat women always make good
nurses."

Magdalena was more than glad to fall out of the gaieties. She was
beginning to feel that most demoralising of all sensations,--the
disintegration of will. Pride, a certain excitement, and novelty had
kept her armour locked for a time; but each time she met Trennahan, the
ordeal of facing him with platitudes, or, what was worse still, in
occasional friendly talks, and of witnessing Helena's little airs of
possession, suggested a future and signal failure. She came to have a
morbid terror that she should betray herself, and when in company with
him kept out of the very reach of his voice. She never went to the
woods, lest she meet him, with or without Helena. In those rustling
arbours of many memories, she knew that she should let fly the passion
within her. She was appalled that neither time nor will nor principle
had authority over her love. She had made up her mind that she would, if
not tear it up by the roots, at least level it to the soil from which it
had sprung, and she was quite ready to believe that love was not all;
that with her youth, intellect, and wealth there was much in life for
her. But the plant flourished and was heavy with bloom. Even while she
avoided him, she longed for the moment when he must of necessity speak
to her. She welcomed the excuse to secede from the ranks of pleasurers,
but even then she started up at every sound of wheels that might