What would he think of her? She was weighing the matter--canvassing its possibility. Was her nature deteriorating? Was she growing coarser, less pure? Would her old friend, whose standard was so high, despise her? Would she be lowered in the eyes of those whose influence and opinions had, heretofore, molded her life? The associations of years are not uprooted and cast aside in days or in months. Responsibilities engendered by the past environed her, full-grown, comprehensible, insistent; responsibilities which might be engendered by the future, lay in her mind a tiny germ in which the embryo life had scarcely begun to stir. The duty to the old life seemed to her plain and clear; a beaten track along which she might safely travel. The duty to another life which might, in time, be equally plain and clear, was now a bewildering mist through which strange shapes passed, like phantasmagoria. She could not think; her mind was benumbed; right and wrong, apparently, had changed places and commingled so, that, for the time, their identity was confused, indistinguishable: she could not guide herself, as yet; she could only hold blindly to the old supports. The silver finger had lifted itself from her lap and rested on her breast, forming a shining pathway from her heart, through the open window, out into the silence and beauty of the night. CHAPTER XX. Winter again; the city dull, listless and sodden of aspect in the gloom of a January evening. In the country, and nature's quiet places, the dusk was throwing a veil over the cheerlessness of earth, as a friend covers a friend's deficiencies with love; but here, in the haunts of men, garish electric lights made plain the misery. The air was a depressing compound which defied analysis; but was apparently composed of equal parts of snow, drizzle, and stinging sleet; the wind caught it in sudden whirls, and dashed it around corners and into the eyes and the coat collars of wayfarers with gusty malevolence. The streets were comparatively deserted, only such people being abroad as could not help themselves, and these plodded along with bent heads, and silent curses on the night. Even the poor creatures who daily "till the field of human sympathy" kept close within the shelter of four walls, no matter how forlorn, and left the elements to hold Walpurgis night in the thoroughfares alone.