Oh! how could she have said such things to him! How could she have thought them! And there she was now in all the agony of her unrestrained passion.

Well he knew, from his long experience of her nature, how she must have suffered to be in such a state of mind, to have so forgotten all the restraint of her teaching and her life! Poor, poor Stephen! Fatherless now as well as motherless; and friendless as well as fatherless! No one to calm her in the height of her wild abnormal passion! No one to comfort her when the fit had passed! No one to sympathise with her for all that she had suffered! No one to help her to build new and better hopes out of the wreck of her mad ideas! He would cheerfully have given his life for her.

Only last night he was prepared to kill, which was worse than to die, for her sake.

And now to be far away, unable to help, unable even to know how she fared.

And behind her eternally the shadow of that worthless man who had spurned her love and flouted her to a chance comer in his drunken delirium.