But if she persuaded Anthony to consent to her wishes--if she insisted upon a total separation between them, what would become of her? What should she do? She had no friends in England; Madame Gobelli had turned against her--she was all alone! She would live and die alone. How should she ever get to know people, or to obtain an entrance to Society. She would be a pariah to the end of her life! And if she did surmount all these obstacles, what would be the result, except a repetition of what had gone before? Strangers would come to know her--to like her--would grow more intimate, and she would respond to their kindness--with the same result. They would droop and fail, die perhaps, like Bobby and the baby--find out that she was the cause, and shun her ever after. “Oh! God!” cried Harriet in her perplexity and anguish, “I am accursed! My parents have made me not fit to live!” She passed that night through the agonies of Death--not the death that overtakes the believer in a God and a Future--but the darkness and uncertainty that enwraps the man who knows he is full of sin and yet has no knowledge that His Lord has paid his debt to the uttermost farthing--the doubt and anxiety that beset the unbeliever when he is called upon to enter the dark Valley. The poor child saw her destiny entangling her as in a net--she longed to break through it, but saw no means of escape--and she rebelled against the cruel lot that heredity had marked out for her. “Why am _I_ to suffer?” she exclaimed aloud; “I have youth and health and good looks, and money--everything, the world would say, calculated to make my life a pleasant one, and yet, I am tortured by this awful thought--that I must keep aloof from everybody, that I am a social leper, full of contagion and death! Doctor Phillips said that the more I loved a person, the more I must keep away from him! It is incredible! unheard-of! Could he have had any motive in saying such a thing?” The remembrance of her flirtation with Ralph Pullen recurred to her mind, and she seized it, as a drowning man clutches at a straw.