Of this dominion she had never dreamed, but she was not so paltry at heart but that it humbled her.

She whispered to herself that she wished this had not been; and yet she knew that to herself she lied, for she would rather have obliterated all else in the universe than the moment in which Bates had said farewell.

The universe held for her, as for everyone, just so much of the high and holy as she had opened her heart to; and, poor girl, her heart had been shut so that this caress of the man whose life had been nearly wrecked by her deed was the highest, holiest thing that had yet found entrance there, and it brought with it into the darkness of her heart, unrecognised but none the less there, the Heaven which is beyond all selfless love, the God who is its source.

Other men might have proffered lavish affection in vain, but in this man's kiss, coming out of his humiliation and resignation, there breathed the power that moves the world.
She did not consider now whether Bates's suffering had been of his own making or hers.

She was not now engaged in an exercise of repentance; compunction, if she felt it, came to her in a nervous tremor, a sob, a tear, not in intelligible thought.