The Transgression of Andrew Vane A Novel

For months past, she had felt that she was weakening, that the crescent wretchedness of five long years--an uninterrupted descent from level to level, on each of which the thorns of disillusion caught at, and tore from her, some shred of hope or self-respect--had done its work at last. Her courage and her faith, inherited, the one from the mental, the Other from the moral, vigour of a rigid and uncompromising Puritan ancestry, were slipping from her. What the end was to be, she did not dare to ask; but it lay there ahead, grim and ominous,