Her hands trembled as she placed them on either side of her, to support
herself on the stone seat. She laid them on her lap; they trembled
there. She held them out, and looked at them wonderingly; they trembled
as she looked. "Like an old woman!" she said, faintly, and let them drop
again at her side.
For the first time, that morning, the cruel discovery had forced itself
on her mind--the discovery that her strength was failing her, at the
time when she had most confidently trusted to it, at the time when she
wanted it most. She had felt the surprise of Mr. Bartram's unexpected
departure, as if it had been the shock of the severest calamity that
could have befallen her. That one check to her hopes--a check which at
other times would only have roused the resisting power in her to new
efforts--had struck her with as suffocating a terror, had prostrated her
with as all-mastering a despair, as if she had been overwhelmed by the
crowning disaster of expulsion from St. Crux. But one warning could be
read in such a change as this. Into the space of little more than a
year she had crowded the wearing and wasting emotions of a life. The
bountiful gifts of health and strength, so prodigally heaped on her by
Nature, so long abused with impunity, were failing her at last.
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