faith. Then,
with a long breath and a curious emotion, he went to try and sleep
himself into the new day.

CHAPTER XV.

The following afternoon about six o'clock Marcella came in from her
second round. After a very busy week, work happened to be slack; and she
had been attending one or two cases in and near Brown's Buildings rather
because they were near than because they seriously wanted her. She
looked to see whether there was any letter or telegram from the office
which would have obliged her to go out again. Nothing was to be seen;
and she put down her bag and cloak, childishly glad of the extra hour of
rest.

She was, indeed, pale and worn. The moral struggle which had filled the
past fortnight from end to end had deepened all the grooves and strained
the forces of life; and the path, though glimmering, was not wholly
plain.

A letter lay unfinished in her drawer--if she sent it that night, there
would be little necessity or inducement for Wharton to climb those
stairs on the morrow. Yet, if he held her to it, she must see him.

As the sunset and the dusk crept on she still sat silent and alone, sunk
in a depression which showed itself in every line of the drooping form.
She was degraded in her own eyes. The nature of the impulses which had
led her to give Wharton the hold upon her she had given him had become
plain to her. What lay between them, and the worst impulses that poison
the lives of women, but differences of degree, of expression? After
those wild hours of sensuous revolt, a kind of moral terror was upon
her.

What had worked in her? What was at the root of this vehemence of moral
reaction, this haunting fear of losing for ever the _best_ in
life--self-respect, the comradeship of the good, communion with things
noble and unstained--which had conquered at last the mere _woman_, the
weakness of vanity and of sex? She hardly knew. Only there was in her a
sort of vague thankfulness _for her daily work_. It did not seem to be
possible to see one's own life solely under the aspects of selfish
desire while hands and mind were busy with the piteous realities of
sickness and of death. From every act of service--from every contact
with the patience and simplicity of the poor--_something_ had spoken to
her, that divine ineffable something for ever "set in the world," like
beauty, like charm, for the winning of men to itself. "Follow truth!" it
said to her in faint mysterious breathings--"the truth