Memory formed a rack on which she was stretched, until her powers of endurance were almost exhausted, and when the release came, it was accompanied by the stupor which follows terrible physical pain. Every circumstance of her past life, every pain in it, from the fiercest pang to the most ignominious little insult, came up to her, and gave her a deliberate wrench, and above all, the sense of loneliness in all this, contradictory though such a feeling was to the general tenor of her thoughts, oppressed her. No one could share that trouble with her which came from the past--therein she must suffer alone. Then she would force herself to think of the dead man, and what he had suffered; to realise that he had actually been living, and her husband, while she was on her voyage to England, while she was living her peaceful life at Chayleigh, while--and at this point in her thoughts she shuddered, and a deadly coldness laid hold upon her-while she had loved and married another man, had filled a high position, and enjoyed all that wealth, station, and consideration could give her. The full horror of her position swept over her then, and afterwards came the deadness, the confusion, the vain helpless weeping over her child, the natural shrinking from what the morrow was to bring, the strange wondering sense of a totally false position, of an utterly new and disturbing element in her life, making all that had gone before seem unreal. The hardest of all was to know, to make herself believe practically, that she, bearing Fitzwilliam Baldwin's name--she, the mother of his child--was not his wife. She knew how innocently, how unconsciously, she had done this wrong; they had made it plain to her how small its importance really was; but she was oppressed with a sense of shame and anguish in reference to it, almost intolerable, even when she did not turn her thoughts towards her child. When she did not! That was seldom, indeed; for, underlying all the rest, there was the agony of the wrong her child had sustained, never to be assuaged, and many times during that dreadful night she uttered aloud to the unconscious infant some of the burden of her soul. The injury to her child, the possible touch of disgrace on the stainless story of Baldwin's life; he who, as she said to herself over and over again, had lived in unblemished honour before the world, he who never needed, never wished to hide thought, or word, or deed of his, he who so loved her--these constituted the almost unbearable agony of the grief which had come upon her. They had told her whence the remedy for all this evil was to be looked for. If the child to be born three months hence should prove to be a son, the wrong would be righted; little Gerty would be no worse than if this had never happened, for it was not in any reason to be feared that the secret should ever transpire. "And if my child should not be a son?" she had asked them simply.