while. I'll send her away as
soon as she's had her breakfast, and she'll have no occasion to know
you're here. There's no holding servants' tongues, if you let 'em know
anything. What they don't know, they won't tell; you may trust 'em so
far. But shouldn't you like me to go and fetch your mother?'

'No, not yet, not yet. I can't bear to see her yet.'

'Well, it shall be just as you like. Now try and get to sleep again. I
shall leave you for an hour or two, and send off Phoebe, and then bring
you some breakfast. I'll lock the door behind me, so that the girl mayn't
come in by chance.'

The daylight changes the aspect of misery to us, as of everything else.
In the night it presses on our imagination--the forms it takes are false,
fitful, exaggerated; in broad day it sickens our sense with the dreary
persistence of definite measurable reality. The man who looks with
ghastly horror on all his property aflame in the dead of night, has not
half the sense of destitution he will have in the morning, when he walks
over the ruins lying blackened in the pitiless sunshine. That moment of
intensest depression was come to Janet, when the daylight which showed
her the walls, and chairs, and tables, and all the commonplace reality
that surrounded her, seemed to lay bare the future too, and bring out
into oppressive distinctness all the details of a weary life to be lived
from day to day, with no hope to strengthen her against that evil habit,
which she loathed in retrospect and yet was powerless to resist. Her
husband would never consent to her living away from him: she was become
necessary to his tyranny; he would never willingly loosen his grasp on
her. She had a vague notion of some protection the law might give her, if
she could prove her life in danger from him; but she shrank utterly, as
she had always done, from any active, public resistance or vengeance: she
felt too crushed, too faulty, too liable to reproach, to have the
courage, even if she had had the wish to put herself openly in the
position of a wronged woman seeking redress. She had no strength to
sustain her in a course of self-defence and independence: there was a
darker shadow over her life than the dread of her husband--it was the
shadow of self-despair. The easiest thing would be to go away and hide
herself from him. But then there was her mother: Robert had all her
little property in his hands, and that little was scarcely enough to keep
her in comfort without