And then she resigned herself to utter .

They who have never known the hours of  that ensue upon the
sudden hearing of some unexpected misfortune,—hours when we would fain
shriek out our  into the ears of the universe, and when, needing
the  and support of others as never before, we are driven, as by
some evil , to darkness and , as though light and sound
were deadly poison to our ,—they, we say, who have never known the
 that threaten to efface all the landmarks of a previously
harmonious inner life, will scarcely be able to conceive that Helene
sank down upon the floor, with her little hands plucking wildly at her
fair curls, and her frail, diminutive form shivering as from a 
wordnetanger.  She had lived and breathed only in her absorbing  for
this man.  If a few gloomy looks, some slight neglect of his, had
sufficed to plunge her into the deepest , and make her utterly
careless of an event that would once have wrung her sisterly 
to the very , how much greater must her  now be in the
conviction that she was about to lose him forever!

In the wild chaos of thought filling her brain, she was entirely
incapable of one clear, decided conclusion. The humiliating
consciousness of her physical infirmities, which caused her to be thrust
out of an