leisure wherein to cultivate the richer and sweeter flowers of their nature.  How artificial had been the delights with which she soothed herself!  Here, all the time, was the reality; here in this poor home, brooded over by the curse of poverty, whence should come shame and woe and death.  What to her now were the elegance of art, the loveliness of nature?  Beauty had been touched by mortality, and its hues were of the corpse, of the grave.  Would the music of a verse ever again fill her with rapture?  How meaningless were all such toys of thought to one whose path lay through the valley of desolation!

Thus did Emily think and feel in this sombre season, the passionate force of her imagination making itself the law of life and the arbiter of her destiny.  She could not take counsel with time; her temperament knew nothing of that compromise with ardours and impulses which is the wisdom of disillusion.  Circumstances willed that she should suffer by the nobleness of her instincts those endowments which might in a happier lot have exalted her to such perfection of calm joy as humanity may attain, were fated to be the source of misery inconceivable by natures less finely cast.

CHAPTER XVII

THEIR SEVERAL WAYS

As Wilfrid quitted the house, the gate was opened by Jessie Cartwright, who, accompanied by one of her sisters, was bringing Emily some fine grapes, purchased, in the Cartwright manner, without regard to expense.  The girls naturally had their curiosity excited by the stranger of interesting, even of aristocratic, appearance, who, as he hurried by, east at them a searching look.

‘Now, who ever may that be?’ murmured Jessie, as she approached the door.

‘A doctor, I dare say,’ was her sister’s suggestion.

’A doctor!  Not he, indeed.  He has something to do with Emily, depend upon it.’

The servant, opening to them, had to report that Miss Hood was too unwell to-day to receive visitors.  Jessie would dearly have liked to ask who it was that apparently had been an exception, but even she lacked the assurance necessary to the putting of such a question.  The girls left their offering, and went their way home; the stranger afforded matter for conversation throughout the walk.

Wilfrid did not go straight to the Baxendales’.  In his distracted state he felt it impossible to sit through luncheon, and he could not immediately decide how to meet Mrs. Baxendale, whether to take her into his confidence or to preserve silence on what had happened.  He was not sure that he would be justified in disclosing the details of such an interview; did he not owe it to Emily to refrain from submitting her action to the judgment of any third person?  If in truth she were still suffering from the effects of her illness, it was worse than unkind to repeat her words; if, on the other hand, her decision came of adequate motives,