peech. Would it not have been better, she asked herself, to merely
avoid the talk she found so hateful by resolutely advancing other
topics? Perhaps not; it was just possible that her words might bear some
kind of fruit. But she wished heartily that this task of hopeless
teaching had never been proposed to her; it would trouble her waking
every other day, and disturb with a profitless annoyance the ideal
serenity for which she was striving.

Yet it had one good result; her mother's follies and weaknesses were
very easy to bear in comparison, and, when the midday meal was over, she
enjoyed with more fulness the peace of her father's room upstairs, where
she had arranged a table for her own work. Brilliant sunlight made the
bare garret, with its outlook over the fields towards Pendal, a cheerful
and homelike retreat. Here, whilst the clock below wheezed and panted
after the relentless hours, Emily read hard at German, or, when her mind
called for rest, sheltered herself beneath the wing of some poet, who
voiced for her the mute hymns of her soul. But the most sacred hour was
when her parents had gone to rest, and she sat in her bedroom, writing
her secret thoughts for Wilfrid some day to read. She had resolved to
keep for him a journal of her inner life from day to day. In this way
she might hope to reveal herself more truthfully than spoken words would
ever allow; she feared that never, not even in the confidence of their
married life, would her tongue learn to overcome the fear of its own
utterances. How little she had told him of herself, of her love! In
Surrey she had been so timid; she had scarcely done more than allow him
to guess her thoughts; and at their last meeting she had been compelled
into opposition of his purpose, so that brief time had been left for
free exchange of tenderness. But some day she would put this little book
of manuscript into his hands, and the shadowy bars between him and her
would vanish. She could only write in it late at night, when the still
voice within spoke clearly amid the hush. The only sound from the outer
world was that of a train now and then speeding by, and that carried her
thoughts to Wilfrid, who had journeyed far from her into other
countries. Emily loved silence, the nurse of the soul; the earliest and
the latest hours were to her most dear. It had never been to her either
an impulse or a joy to realise the existence of the mass of mankind; she
had shrunk, after the first e