The sun was going down when I rose up, soothed and comforted, and strengthened, too, for a time. I would do what I could. I would live down this grief: how I knew not, but the way would come to me. And gathering up my hair, which had fallen around me, I stopped, on my way home, by a running stream, and bathed my eyes and forehead until I was fit to appear before my step-mother. She did not question me; she was too used to my unexplained absences since I had grown out of her control. Sufficient for her that my tasks were always performed; sufficient for her, that, that very evening, I threw myself with an apparently untiring energy into the household work,--that I never rested a moment till she herself closed the house and insisted that I should go to bed. I slept that night,--after such fatigue, it was impossible but that I should,--and woke in the morning with a renewed determination to struggle against my sorrow. Alas! alas! I thought I had only to resolve. I thought the struggle would be but once. How little I knew of the daily, almost hourly, changes of feeling,--of the despondency, the despair, that would come, I knew not why, directly upon my most earnest resolves, my hardest struggles,--of the weakness that would make me at times give up all struggling as useless,--of the mad hope that would sometimes arise that something, some outward change, I did not dare to say what, would bring me some relief! I had at least the courage to keep away from the sight of all that was so miserable to me. I did not see George Hammond for weeks, and he--ah! there was the bitterness--he did not miss me. And so the weary days went on. It is wonderful what endurance there is in a young heart,--for how long a time it can beat off suffering all day by unceasing labor, and lie awake all night with that same suffering for a bedfellow, and still make no sign that a careless eye can see I look at that time now with wonder. How did I bear that constant occupation by day, alternated only with those sleepless nights, without breaking down entirely? The crisis came at last,--a sort of stupor, a cessation of suffering indeed, but a cessation, too, of all feeling. I was frightened at myself. Alas! I had no one to be frightened for me. Could it be that I was going to lose my senses? But no, I passed through that too, and then came a more natural state of mind than any I had known since the blow fell.