‘Ever your grateful ‘A. W.’ Sara still walked to and fro, but in profound and painful reverie. Her very soul pitied her unhappy little successful rival. She felt as if she would have liked nothing better than to take Nita to her bosom and soothe and comfort her, so intensely she felt for the girl in her pain and desolation. Could she by a word, even by some sacrifice on her own part, have given Nita her husband’s love, and wiped from her mind all knowledge of his past transgressions, how gladly she would have done it! for Sara, in her solitude at _Mein Genügen_, had scaled higher moral summits than she herself knew–she thought she had not completely cast away the old love, or the effects of it–she did not realise that the substance of it had been burnt away; what remained was a shadow, a heap of ashes, retaining the shape of that which was in reality consumed. It was well that she saw the evil which remained, and not the good which was accomplished, else had she been in danger of succumbing to that ‘palsy of self-satisfaction’ which has a trick of seizing upon and blighting the finest natures. But she knew that no word of hers could give to Nita Wellfield her husband’s love. She felt, she had gathered from a hundred unconscious little touches and admissions in Avice’s letters, that Jerome, like herself, was not free. He loved her–Sara: yet sometimes she could weep, and wish it were not so. Oftener she felt a half-contemptuous satisfaction in the knowledge that he had not been able to cast aside her power over him with his promises to her. But oftener still she had the feeling, which she instinctively felt to be a far more dangerous one, of a restless wonder what would happen if they were to meet; a wonder that sometimes grew into something nearly akin to a longing. Before this feeling she trembled, trying to release herself from it, but it had a trick of seizing her unawares, and mastering her. And it was in such moments that she felt what a slight division lay between her present calm, monotonous existence, and the great abyss opening under the feet of those who yield to reckless impulses, or to what are euphoniously called ‘ungovernable passions.’ Such thoughts, and her meditations upon Avice’s letters, ran like a key-note through her mental life at that time–tinctured all her thoughts, her reading, her work; for since she had begun to believe that she was never to paint again, she had had resort to needle-work, and was copying some curious old Flemish lace, under the tutelage of a nun from a neighbouring cloister. Under her auspices, too, she had discovered some poor in and around the town, and not only poor, but ignorant; and she found some occupation in helping and teaching them. ‘That high-and-mighty Miss Ford turned lace-maker and sister of charity–buried alive in the dullest place in the world, and crying her eyes out from pure _Langeweile_, because she has displeased her husband, who is jealous, and has shut her up there!’