ghtning-flash through the dark and unfrequented chambers of memory.

When Janet sat down shivering on the door-stone, with the door shut upon
her past life, and the future black and unshapen before her as the night,
the scenes of her childhood, her youth and her painful womanhood, rushed
back upon her consciousness, and made one picture with her present
desolation. The petted child taking her newest toy to bed with her--the
young girl, proud in strength and beauty, dreaming that life was an easy
thing, and that it was pitiful weakness to be unhappy--the bride, passing
with trembling joy from the outer court to the inner sanctuary of woman's
life--the wife, beginning her initiation into sorrow, wounded, resenting,
yet still hoping and forgiving--the poor bruised woman, seeking through
weary years the one refuge of despair, oblivion:--Janet seemed to herself
all these in the same moment that she was conscious of being seated on
the cold stone under the shock of a new misery. All her early gladness,
all her bright hopes and illusions, all her gifts of beauty and
affection, served only to darken the riddle of her life; they were the
betraying promises of a cruel destiny which had brought out those sweet
blossoms only that the winds and storms might have a greater work of
desolation, which had nursed her like a pet fawn into tenderness and fond
expectation, only that she might feel a keener terror in the clutch of
the panther. Her mother had sometimes said that troubles were sent to
make us better and draw us nearer to God. What mockery that seemed to
Janet! _Her_ troubles had been sinking her lower from year to year,
pressing upon her like heavy fever-laden vapours, and perverting the very
plenitude of her nature into a deeper source of disease. Her wretchedness
had been a perpetually tightening instrument of torture, which had
gradually absorbed all the other sensibilities of her nature into the
sense of pain and the maddened craving for relief. Oh, if some ray of
hope, of pity, of consolation, would pierce through the horrible gloom,
she might believe _then_ in a Divine love--in a heavenly Father who cared
for His children! But now she had no faith, no trust. There was nothing
she could lean on in the wide world, for her mother was only a
fellow-sufferer in her own lot. The poor patient woman could do little
more than mourn with her daughter: she had humble resignation enough to
sustain her own soul, but she could no more g