"Is she still like a shadow?"
"Like little else. The fever of the mind is consuming the body. I look upon it as the most hopeless case I have ever known. Adela does the same, though from a different point of view. She is dying for her husband's forgiveness. She would like to live in his memory as one not abjectly despicable, and she knows she must and does so live in it. She pictures his contempt for her, his condemnation of the way she acted in the past; and her humiliation, coupled with remorse, has grown into a disease. Yes, it is a miserable case. They are as entirely and hopelessly separated as they could be by death."
"Ah, Cleveland! You are here, then?"
The interruption came from the earl. He stepped forward to shake hands, and drew a chair beside the Rector.
"We were talking of Adela," said the countess, when the few words of greeting were over. "She has not come to her senses yet."
"I was saying that her case is certainly one of the most hopeless ever known," observed Mr. Cleveland. "She is as utterly separated from her husband as she could be by death, whilst both are yet living, and have probably a long life before them."
Lord Acorn sighed. "One can't help being sorry for Adela, wrong and mistaken though she was."
Mr. Cleveland glanced at the earl. "I am glad you came in," he said. "I wanted to speak to you as well as to Lady Acorn. Adela talks of going into a Sisterhood."
"Into a what?" cried her ladyship; her tone one of unbounded surprise.
"She has had the idea in her mind for some time, I fancy," continued the Rector. "I heard of it first last autumn, when she startled me one day by suddenly expressing a wish that she was a Roman Catholic. I found that the wish did not proceed from any desire to change her creed, but simply because the Roman Catholics possess places of refuge in the shape of convents, into which a poor creature, as Adela expressed it, tired of having no longer a place in the world, might enter, and find peace."