grown in her which made life a succession of alternating longings and
despairs. For Emily was not so constituted that the phase of thought and
feeling which had been brought about by the tragedy of her home could
perpetuate itself and become her normal consciousness. When she fled
from Dunfield she believed that the impulses then so strong would
prevail with her to the end of her life, that the motives which were
then predominant in her soul would maintain their ruling force for ever.
And many months went by before she suspected that her imagination had
deceived her; imagination, ever the most potent factor of her being, the
source alike of her strength and her weakness. But there came a day when
the poignancy of her grief was subdued, and she looked around her upon a
world more desolate than that in which she found herself on the day of
her mother's burial. She began to know once more that she was young, and
that existence stretched before her a limitless tract of barren
endurance.

The rare natures which are in truth ruled by the instinct of
renunciation, which find in the mortification of sense a spring of
unearthly joy brimming higher with each self-conquest, may experience
temptation and relapse, but the former is a new occasion for the arming
of the spirit, and the latter speedily leads to a remorse which is the
strongest of all incentives to ascetic struggle. Emily had not upon her
the seal of sainthood. It was certain that at some point of her life
asceticism would make irresistible claim upon the strongholds of her
imagination; none the less certain that it would be but for a time, that
it would prove but a stage in her development. To her misfortune the
occasion presented itself in connection with her strongest native
affections, and under circumstances which led her to an irretrievable
act. Had she been brought up in a Roman Catholic country she would
doubtless have thrown herself into a convent, finding her stern joy in
the thought that no future wavering was possible. Attempting to make a
convent of her own mind, she soon knew too well that her efforts mocked
her, that there was in her an instinct stronger than that of
renunciation, and that she had condemned herself to a life of futile
misery.

Her state of mind for the year following her father's death was morbid,
little differing from madness; and she came at length to understand
that. When time had tempered her anguish, she saw with clear eyes that
he