hat was
before her, visible in every line, what she felt with fingers which began
to tremble, she could not tell. Time did not count with her as with
common men. She did not grow weary, or require refreshment or rest, like
those who were still of this world. Put at length her head grew giddy and
her heart failed. A cold despair took possession of her soul. She could
do nothing, then,--nothing; neither by help of man, neither by use of her
own faculties, which were greater and clearer than ever before. She sank
down upon the floor at the foot of that old toy, which had pleased her in
the softness of her old age, to which she had trusted the fortunes of
another; by which, in wantonness and folly she had sinned, she had
sinned! And she thought she saw standing round her companions in the land
she had left, saying, "It is impossible, impossible!" with infinite pity
in their eyes; and the face of him who had given her permission to come,
yet who had said no word to her to encourage her in what was against
nature. And there came into her heart a longing to fly, to get home, to
be back in the land where her fellows were, and her appointed place. A
child lost, how pitiful that is! without power to reason and divine how
help will come; but a soul lost, outside of one method of existence,
withdrawn from the other, knowing no way to retrace its steps, nor how
help can come! There had been no bitterness in passing from earth to the
land where she had gone; but now there came upon her soul, in all the
power of her new faculties, the bitterness of death. The place which was
hers she had forsaken and left, and the place that had been hers knew her
no more.

VII.

Mary, when she left her kind friend in the vicarage, went out and took a
long walk. She had received a shock so great that it took all sensation
from her, and threw her into the seething and surging of an excitement
altogether beyond her control. She could not think until she had got
familiar with the idea, which indeed had been vaguely shaping itself in
her mind ever since she had emerged from the first profound gloom and
prostration of the shadow of death. She had never definitely thought of
her position before,--never even asked herself what was to become of her
when Lady Mary died. She did not see, any more than Lady Mary did, why
she should ever die; and girls, who have never wanted anything in their
lives, who have had no sharp experience to enlighten them, are