e," he said, "and it checks the suffering." He
went away, saying that he feared he would never see the child alive
again. One of the kindest friends I had in my married life was that
same doctor, Mr. Lauriston Winterbotham; he was as good as he was
clever, and, like so many of his noble profession, he had the merits of
discretion and silence. He never breathed a word as to my unhappiness,
until in 1878 he came up to town to give evidence as to cruelty
which--had the deed of separation not been held as condonation--would
have secured me a divorce _a mensa et thoro._

The child, however, recovered, and her recovery was due, I think, to
that chance thought of Mr. Winterbotham's about the chloroform, for I
used it whenever the first sign of a fit of coughing appeared, and so
warded off the convulsive attack and the profound exhaustion that
followed, in which a mere flicker of breath at the top of the throat
was the only sign of life, and sometimes even that disappeared, and I
thought her gone. For years the child remained ailing and delicate,
requiring the tenderest care, but those weeks of anguish left a deeper
trace on mother than on child. Once she was out of danger I collapsed
physically, and lay in bed for a week unmoving, and then rose to face a
struggle which lasted for three years and two months, and nearly cost
me my life, the struggle which transformed me from a Christian into an
Atheist. The agony of the struggle was in the first nineteen months--a
time to be looked back upon with shrinking, as it was a hell to live
through at the time. For no one who has not felt it knows the fearful
anguish inflicted by doubt on the earnestly religious soul. There is in
life no other pain so horrible, so keen in its torture, so crushing in
its weight. It seems to shipwreck everything, to destroy the one steady
gleam of happiness "on the other side" that no earthly storm could
obscure; to make all life gloomy with a horror of despair, a darkness
that verily may be felt. Nothing but an imperious intellectual and
moral necessity can drive into doubt a religious mind, for it is as
though an earthquake shook the foundations of the soul, and the very
being quivers and sways under the shock. No life in the empty sky; no
gleam in the blackness of the night; no voice to break the deadly
silence; no hand outstretched to save. Empty-brained triflers who have
never tried to think, who take their creed as they take their fashions,
speak of