"How strange! I am happier than I have ever been in my life before; I didn't know that there was such happiness!" A door seemed to open, showing a way out of her trouble, a way which led to a vision of subtle sweetness--her life through the future with this passion hidden like a treasure in her heart, no one to know it, no one to suspect its existence. "As I am to be nothing to him, as I wish to be nothing to him, I shall not care whom _he_ loves; that is nothing to me." Upon this basis she would arrange her life. But it is not so easy to arrange life. Almost immediately she began to suffer, a species of suffering, too, to which she was unused: trifles annoyed her like innumerable stings--she was not able to preserve her calm; as regarded anything important, she could have been herself, or so she imagined; but little things irritated her, and the days were full of little things. She rebelled against this nervousness, but she could not subdue it; and gradually the beautiful vision of her life, as she had imagined it, faded away miserably in a cloud of petty exasperations and despair. After wretched hours, unable to endure her humiliation longer, she resolved to conquer herself at any cost, to set herself free; she could not go away, because she would not leave Cicely; there was still her brother's child; but here, on the spot, she would overcome this feeling that had taken possession of her and changed her so that she did not know herself. "I _will_!" she said. It was a vow; her will was the strongest force of her being. This very will blinded her, she was too sure of it. She was in earnest about wishing and intending to win in her great battle. But she forgot the details. These are some of the details: The one time of day when Paul was neither at the mine nor in his office was at sunset; twice she went through a chain of reasoning to prove to herself that she had a necessary errand at that hour at one of the stores; both times she met him. She had heard Paul say that he liked to see women sew; she was no needlewoman; but presently she began to embroider an apron for Jack (with very poor success). Paul was no reader; he looked through the newspapers once a day, and when it rained very hard in the evening, and there was nothing else to do, occasionally he took up his one book; for he had but one, at least so Hollis declared; at any rate he read but one; this one was Gibbon. The only edition of the great history in the little book-store of Port aux Pins was a miserably printed copy in paper covers. But a lady bought it in spite of its blurred type.