Then came the blow,--very quickly, the blow which, as she now told herself morning, noon, and night, was no worse than she had expected. Another woman claimed the man as her husband, and so claimed him that the world all around her had declared that the claim would be made good. And the man himself had owned enough to make him unfit,--as she thought,--to have the custody of any honest woman. Then she acknowledged to herself the full weight of the misfortune that had fallen upon them,--the misfortune which never would have fallen upon them had they listened to her counsel,--and she had immediately put her shoulders to the wheel with the object of rescuing her child from the perils, from the sin, from the degradation of her position. And could she have rescued her, could she have induced her daughter to remain at Puritan Grange, there would even then have been consolation. It was one of the tenets of her life,--the strongest, perhaps, of all those doctrines on which she built her faith,--that this world is a world of woe; that wailing and suffering, if not gnashing of teeth, is and should be the condition of mankind preparatory to eternal bliss. For eternal bliss there could, she thought, be no other preparation. She did not want to be happy here, or to have those happy around her whom she loved. She had stumbled and gone astray,--she told herself hourly now that she had stumbled and gone astray,--in preparing those roses and ribbons, and other lightnesses for her young girl. It should have been all sackcloth and ashes. Had it been all sackcloth and ashes there would not have been this terrible fall. But if the loved one would now come back to sackcloth and ashes,--if she would assent to the blackness of religious asceticism, to penitence and theological gloom, and would lead the life of the godly but comfortless here in order that she might insure the glories and joys of the future life, then there might be consolation;--then it might be felt that this tribulation had been a precious balm by which an erring soul had been brought back to its due humility.