anger
still it may seem, that as her thoughts recovered from their first
chaos, she felt more embittered against the world, more crushed by a
sense of shame, and yet galled by a no less keen sense of injustice, in
recalling the scorn with which Darrell had rejected all excuse for
her conduct in the misery it had occasioned her, than she did by the
consciousness of her own lamentable errors. As in Darrell's esteem there
was something that, to those who could appreciate it, seemed invaluable,
so in his contempt to those who had cherished that esteem there was a
weight of ignominy, as if a judge had pronounced a sentence that outlaws
the rest of life.

Arabella had not much left out of her munificent salary. What she had
hitherto laid by had passed to Jasper--defraying, perhaps, the very cost
of his flight with her treacherous rival. When her money was gone, she
pawned the poor relics of her innocent happy girlhood, which she had
been permitted to take from her father's home, and had borne with her
wherever she went, like household gods, the prize-books, the lute, the
costly work-box, the very bird-cage, all which the reader will remember
to have seen in her later life, the books never opened--the lute broken,
the bird long, long, long vanished from the cage! Never did she think
she should redeem those pledges from that Golgotha, which takes, rarely
to give back, so many hallowed tokens of the Dreamland called "Better
Days,"--the trinkets worn at the first ball, the ring that was given
with the earliest love-vow--yea, even the very bells and coral that
pleased the infant in his dainty cradle, and the very Bible in which
the lips, that now bargain for sixpence more, read to some grey-haired
father on his bed of death!

Soon the sums thus miserably raised were as miserably doled away. With a
sullen apathy the woman contemplated famine. She would make no effort to
live--appeal to no relations, no friends. It was a kind of vengeance she
took on others, to let herself drift on to death. She had retreated from
lodging to lodging, each obscurer, more desolate than the other. Now,
she could no longer pay rent for the humblest room; now, she was told
to go forth--whither? She knew not--cared not--took her way towards
the River, as by that instinct which, when the mind is diseased, tends
towards self-destruction, scarce less involuntarily than it turns,
in health, towards self-preservation. Just as she passed under the
lamp-light