of pain should ebb, leaving her
stranded, a helpless wreck on the desert shores of inactivity? What
would life be to Bessy without movement? Thought would never set her
blood flowing--motion, in her, could only take the form of the physical
processes. Her love for Amherst was dead--even if it flickered into life
again, it could but put the spark to smouldering discords and
resentments; and would her one uncontaminated sentiment--her affection
for Cicely--suffice to reconcile her to the desolate half-life which was
the utmost that science could hold out?

Here again, Justine's experience answered no. She did not believe in
Bessy's powers of moral recuperation--her body seemed less near death
than her spirit. Life had been poured out to her in generous measure,
and she had spilled the precious draught--the few drops remaining in the
cup could no longer renew her strength.

Pity, not condemnation--profound illimitable pity--flowed from this
conclusion of Justine's. To a compassionate heart there could be no
sadder instance of the wastefulness of life than this struggle of the
small half-formed soul with a destiny too heavy for its strength. If
Bessy had had any moral hope to fight for, every pang of suffering would
have been worth enduring; but it was intolerable to witness the
spectacle of her useless pain.

Incessant commerce with such thoughts made Justine, as the days passed,
crave any escape from solitude, any contact with other ideas. Even the
reappearance of Westy Gaines, bringing a breath of common-place
conventional grief into the haunted silence of the house, was a respite
from her questionings. If it was hard to talk to him, to answer his
enquiries, to assent to his platitudes, it was harder, a thousand times,
to go on talking to herself....

Mr. Tredegar's coming was a distinct relief. His dryness was like
cautery to her wound. Mr. Tredegar undoubtedly grieved for Bessy; but
his grief struck inward, exuding only now and then, through the fissures
of his hard manner, in a touch of extra solemnity, the more laboured
rounding of a period. Yet, on the whole, it was to his feeling that
Justine felt her own to be most akin. If his stoic acceptance of the
inevitable proceeded from the resolve to spare himself pain, that at
least was a form of strength, an indication of character. She had never
cared for the fluencies of invertebrate sentiment.

Now, on the evening of the day after her talk with Bessy, it was more