aw a woman standing motionless in
the doorway, without cloak or bonnet, her dank garments clinging to her
form and dripping with rain.

When Juliet woke that morning, she cared little that the sky was dull
and the earth dark. A selfish sorrow, a selfish love even, makes us
stupid, and Juliet had been growing more and more stupid. Many people,
it seems to me, through sorrow endured perforce and without a gracious
submission, slowly sink in the scale of existence. Such are some of
those middle-aged women, who might be the very strength of social
well-being, but have no aspiration, and hope only downward--after rich
husbands for their daughters, it may be--a new bonnet or an old
coronet--the devil knows what.

Bad as the weather had been the day before, Dorothy had yet contrived to
visit her, and see that she was provided with every necessary; and
Juliet never doubted she would come that day also. She thought of
Dorothy's ministrations as we so often do of God's--as of things that
come of themselves, for which there is no occasion to be thankful.

When she had finished the other little house-work required for her
comfort, a labor in which she found some little respite from the
gnawings of memory and the blankness of anticipation, she ended by
making up a good fire, though without a thought of Dorothy's being wet
when she arrived, and sitting down by the window, stared out at the
pools, spreading wider and wider on the gravel walks beneath her. She
sat till she grew chilly, then rose and dropped into an easy chair by
the fire, and fell fast asleep.

She slept a long time, and woke in a terror, seeming to have waked
herself with a cry. The fire was out, and the hearth cold. She shivered
and drew her shawl about her. Then suddenly she remembered the frightful
dream she had had.

She dreamed that she had just fled from her husband and gained the park,
when, the moment she entered it, something seized her from behind, and
bore her swiftly, as in the arms of a man--only she seemed to hear the
rush of wings behind her--the way she had been going. She struggled in
terror, but in vain; the power bore her swiftly on, and she knew
whither. Her very being recoiled from the horrible depth of the
motionless pool, in which, as she now seemed to know, lived one of the
loathsome creatures of the semi-chaotic era of the world, which had
survived its kind as well as its coevals, and was ages older than the
human race. The pool appeared