All the heroic scale, all the more than earthly depth of passion, all the spiritualised desires that sprang into being beneath the shadow of the approaching end, had come down to the common level of an undesirable attachment, along which she must drag her weary feet for many a year.

Nor was this all.

She had been false to Bessie; more, she had broken Bessie's lover's troth.

She had tempted him and he had fallen, and now he was as bad as she.

Death would have justified all this; never would she have done it had she thought that she was doomed to live; but now Death had cheated her, as is his fashion with people to whom his presence is more or less desirable, leaving her to cope with the spirit she had invoked when his sword was quivering over her.
What would be the end of it in the event of their escape?
What could be the end except misery?
It should go no farther, far as it had gone--that she swore; no, not if it broke her heart and his too.