He would never be content with one rejection; she
believed she could not in his place. She had been very wrong, but
now she would endeavour to do right, and have womanly patience,
until he saw her changed and repentant mind in her natural actions.
Even if she had to wait for years, it was no more than now it was
easy to look forward to, as a penance for her giddy flirting on the
one hand, and her cruel mistake concerning her feelings on the
other. So anticipating a happy ending in the course of her love,
however distant it might be, she fell asleep just as the earliest
factory bells were ringing. She had sunk down in her clothes, and
her sleep was unrefreshing. She wakened up shivery and chill in
body, and sorrow-stricken in mind, though she could not at first
rightly tell the cause of her depression.
She recalled the events of the night before, and still resolved to
adhere to the determinations she had then formed. But patience
seemed a far more difficult virtue this morning.
She hastened downstairs, and in her earnest, sad desire to do right,
now took much pains to secure a comfortable though scanty breakfast
for her father; and when he dawdled into the room, in an evidently
irritable temper, she bore all with the gentleness of penitence,
till at last her mild answers turned away wrath.
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