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 explained much that had been a mystery to her.

“My dear,” her friend Lady Merivale had once said to her, “how did you ever come to marry that dreadful creature?” She might have told, but she would not; there are here and there little things which we keep to our- selves. But those once cogent reasons which urged her to marry seemed less assertive now. If she had only waited! How many women have thought the same thought, uttered the same wish?

And so she sat by the window thinking it all out, and the night grew, and a sudden strange stillness seemed to roll across the earth.

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