“Ah! just so!” she said, in bitterness.  “And if I cried to God for ever, I should hear no word of reply.  If he be, he sits apart, and leaves the weak to be the prey of the bad.  What cares he?”

Yet, as she spoke, she rose, and, by a sudden impulse, threw herself on the floor, and cried for the first time: 

“O God, help me!”

Was there voice or hearing?

She rose at least with a little hope, and with the feeling that if she could cry to him, it might be that he could listen to her.  It seemed natural to pray; it seemed to come of itself:  that could not be except it was first natural for God to hear.  The foundation of her own action must be in him who made her; for her call could be only a response after all.

The time passed wearily by.  Dim, slow November days came on, with the fall of the last brown shred of those clouds of living green that had floated betwixt earth and heaven.  Through the bare boughs of the overarching avenue of the Ghost’s Walk, themselves living skeletons, she could now look straight up to the blue sky, which had been there all the time.  And she had begun to look up to a higher heaven, through the bare skeleton shapes of life; for the foliage of joy had wholly vanished —­ shall we say in order that the children of the spring might come? —­ certainly in order first that the blue sky of a deeper peace might reflect itself in the hitherto darkened waters of her soul.

Perhaps some of my readers may think that she had enough to repent of to keep her from weariness.  She had plenty to repent of, no doubt; but repentance, between the paroxysms of its bitterness, is a very dreary and November-like state of the spiritual weather.  For its foggy mornings and cheerless noons cannot believe in the sun of spring, soon to ripen into the sun of summer; and its best time is the night, that shuts out the world and weeps its fill of slow tears.  But she was not altogether so blameworthy as she may have appeared.  Her affectations had not been altogether false.  She valued, and in a measure possessed, the feelings for which she sought credit.  She had a genuine enjoyment of nature, though after a sensuous, Keats-like fashion, not a Wordsworthian.  It was the body, rather than the soul, of nature that she loved —­ its beauty rather than its truth.  Had her love of nature been of the deepest, she would have turned aside to conceal her emotions rather than have held them up as allurements in the eyes of her companion.  But as no body and no beauty can exist without soul and truth, she who loves the former must at least be capable of loving the deeper essence to which they owe their very existence.

This view of her character is borne out by her love of music and her liking for Hugh.  Both were genuine.  Had the latter been either more or less genuine than it was, the task of fascination would have been more difficult, and its success less complete.  Whether her own feelings became further involved than she had calculated upon, I cannot tell; but surely it says something for her, in any case, that she desired to retain Hugh as her friend, instead of hating him because he had been her lover.