Nevertheless, she shivered,
and drawing her shawl closely around her began to collect some
half-burnt fragments of wood in the chimney to make a fire. But the
preoccupation of her thoughts rendered this a tedious process, as she
would from time to time stop in the middle of an action and fall into
an attitude of rapt abstraction, with far-off eyes and rigid mouth.
When she had at last succeeded in kindling a fire and raising a film of
pale blue smoke, that seemed to fade and dissipate entirely before it
reached the top of the chimney shaft, she crouched beside it, fixed her
eyes on the darkest corner of the cavern, and became motionless.
What did she see through that shadow?
Nothing at first but a confused medley of figures and incidents of the
preceding night; things to be put away and forgotten; things that would
not have happened but for another thing--the thing before which
everything faded! A ball-room; the sounds of music; the one man she had
cared for insulting her with the flaunting ostentation of his
unfaithfulness; herself despised, put aside, laughed at, or worse,
jilted.
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