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Horrible
thought! and she shook like an aspen, beneath it. For a time it seemed
that she loathed him,--that she despised the woman who had given him
regard. The present moment was a point of dreadful isolation; there was
no past to remember, no future to expect; she herself was alone and
forsaken, the whole world dark, and heaven blank. But that could not be
forever. As she sat with her face buried in her hands, old words, old
looks, flashed on her recollection; she comprehended what long years of
silent suffering the one might have endured, what barren yearning the
other; she saw how her mother's haughty calm might be the crust on a
lava-sea; she felt what desolation must have filled Roger Raleigh's
heart, when he found that she whom he had loved no longer lived, that he
had cherished a lifeless ideal,--for Marguerite knew from his own lips
that he had not met the same woman whom he had left.
She started up, wondering what had led her upon this train of thought,
why she had pursued it, and what reason she had for the pain it gave
her.


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