With this pretty exercise she beguiled the hours of labour, and consoled herself for Mr.Archer's bearing.
Pity was her weapon and her weakness.

To accept the loved one's faults, although it has an air of freedom, is to kiss the chain, and this pity it was which, lying nearer to her heart, lent the one element of true emotion to a fanciful and merely brain-sick love.
Thus it fell out one day that she had gone to the 'Green Dragon' and brought back thence a letter to Mr.Archer.

He, upon seeing it, winced like a man under the knife: pain, shame, sorrow, and the most trenchant edge of mortification cut into his heart and wrung the steady composure of his face.
'Dear heart! have you bad news ?' she cried.
But he only replied by a gesture and fled to his room, and when, later on, she ventured to refer to it, he stopped her on the threshold, as if with words prepared beforehand.

'There are some pains,' said he, 'too acute for consolation, or I would bring them to my kind consoler.

Let the memory of that letter, if you please, be buried.' And then as she continued to gaze at him, being, in spite of herself, pained by his elaborate phrase, doubtfully sincere in word and manner: 'Let it be enough,' he added haughtily, 'that if this matter wring my heart, it doth not touch my conscience.