She lay down on her bed with a heavy sigh, and tried to sleep. It was
useless. The dull weariness of herself which now possessed her was not
the weariness which finds its remedy in repose. She rose again and sat
by the window, looking out listlessly over the sea.
A weaker nature than hers would not have felt the shock of Frank's
desertion as she had felt it--as she was feeling it still. A weaker
nature would have found refuge in indignation and comfort in tears. The
passionate strength of Magdalen's love clung desperately to the sinking
wreck of its own delusion-clung, until she tore herself from it, by
plain force of will. All that her native pride, her keen sense of wrong
could do, was to shame her from dwelling on the thoughts which still
caught their breath of life from the undying devotion of the past; which
still perversely ascribed Frank's heartless farewell to any cause but
the inborn baseness of the man who had written it. The woman never lived
yet who could cast a true-love out of her heart because the object of
that love was unworthy of her. All she can do is to struggle against it
in secret--to sink in the contest if she is weak; to win her way through
it if she is strong, by a process of self-laceration which is, of all
moral remedies applied to a woman's nature, the most dangerous and the
most desperate; of all moral changes, the change that is surest to mark
her for life.
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