s
inducing to speculation.

She thought of him till she could have reproached him for not returning
and helping her to get away from the fever of other thoughts:--this
anguish twisting about her parents, and the dreadful trammels of
gratitude to a man afflictingly generous, the frown of congregated
people.

The latter was the least of evils; she had her charges to bring against
them for injustice: uncited, unstirred charges, they were effective as
a muffled force to sustain her: and the young who are of healthy lively
blood and clean conscience have either emotion or imagination to fold
them defensively from an enemy world; whose power to drive them forth
into the wilderness they acknowledge. But in the wilderness their souls
are not beaten down by breath of mortals; they burn straight flame there
up to the parent Spirit.

She could not fancy herself flying thither;--where to be shorn and naked
and shivering is no hardship, for the solitude clothes, and the sole
true life in us resolves to that steady flame;--she was restrained by
Dudley's generosity, which held her fast to have the forgiveness for
her uncommitted sin dashed in her face. He surprised her; the unexpected
quality in him seemed suddenly to have snared her fast: and she did not
obtain release after seeing behind it;--seeing it, by the light of
what she demanded, personal, shallow, a lover's generosity. So her
keen intellect saw it; and her young blood (for the youthful are thus
divided) thrilled in thinking it must be love! The name of the sacred
passion lifted it out of the petty cabin of the individual into a
quiring cathedral universal, and subdued her. It subdued her with
an unwelcome touch of tenderness when she thought of it as involving
tenderness for her mother, some chivalrous respect for her mother.
Could he love the daughter without some little, which a more intimate
knowledge of her dear mother would enlarge? The girl's heart flew to her
mother, clung to her, vindicated her dumbly. It would not inquire, and
it refused to hear, hungering the while. She sent forth her flights
of stories in elucidation of the hidden; and they were like white bird
after bird winging to covert beneath a thundercloud; until her breast
ached for the voice of the thunder: harsh facts: sure as she was of her
never losing her filial hold of the beloved. She and her mother grew
together, they were one. Accepting the shadow, they were the closer one
beneath it. She had