"This much I understand," he replied. "You have suffered a great deal, where many women would have suffered little. It is your nature to, do so. Therefore, I dread for you, with unspeakable intensity, the deeper suffering you would bring upon yourself--most of all the knowledge, which, sooner or later must come to you that you had done wrong, grievously wrong--for it is not a case where duty is difficult of recognition." She did not answer, but sometimes silence is better than words. She went upstairs to the neat, bare, unhomelike lodging-house drawing-room, and sat down to think. She thought and thought so long and so deeply, that poor Rachel knocked several times before she was heard, and, unfortunately, it was past post-time! So no letter reached Wareborough the next morning. VOLUME THREE, CHAPTER SEVEN. ROMA TO THE RESCUE. That he has his faults cannot be doubtful; for we believe it was ascertained long ago, that there is no man free from them. _Carlyle_. It is dreary work--perhaps no one who has not had personal experience of it can imagine how dreary--to find oneself really alone in a strange place, with no customary daily duties to compel one's attention, however unwilling; no chance of a friendly face looking in to break the monotony of the empty day; no anticipation even of the post bringing distraction in the shape of news, good or bad. Such had been Eugenia's life for two days at Nunswell, and already in these two days she had many times been on the point of saying to herself she could not stand it much longer. "And is this to be my life?" she thought with a shiver, for, in the excitement of flying from her home, she had taken no account of the loneliness and dreariness that lay beyond. Now, the unconcealed disapproval of her nearest friends, the realisation of her anomalous position alone in lodgings in a strange place, were already bringing home, even to her uncalculating inexperience, something of the personal suffering, the bitter deprivations, the indefinite suspicion which must attach themselves to even the purest and noblest of women, once she voluntarily abandons her home. There may be cases, doubtless there are such, where a wife has no choice, where duty itself, deaf to all suggestions of expediency, relentlessly points out the way to abandonment of the post bravely battled for to the last--but such cases are rare, and the women to whose bitter experience they fall must have suffered too terribly to be sensitive to loneliness, or monotony, or half-averted looks. Not so was it with Eugenia Chancellor. What she had learnt from her sister of Frank's opinion of her conduct had wounded her to the quick; her only idea had been at once to relieve her friends of her unwelcome presence, but she had altogether failed to realise the desolation and hopeless depression which seized upon her before she had been many hours in the Nunswell lodgings.