In his last years they had
been very far apart, and his death relieved her from the perpetual
contemplation of a tragedy. Lord Rens had grown to regard his daughter
almost with enmity in his enmity against her mother's religion, which
was hers. She had come to think of him rather with pity than with love.
Yet his death was a shock to her. When he could speak no more, but only
lie still, she remembered suddenly just what he had been before her
mother's flight. The succeeding period, long though it had been and
ugly, was blotted out. She wept for the poor, broken life now ended,
and was afraid for his future in the other world. His departure into the
unknown roused her abruptly to a clear conception of how his action and
her mother's had affected her own character. As she stood by his bed
she wondered what she might have been if her mother had been true, her
father happy, to the end. Then she felt afraid of herself, recognising
partially, and for the first time, how all these years had seen her long
indifference. She felt self-conscious too, ignorant of the real meaning
of life, and as if she had always been, and still remained, rather a
complicated piece of mechanism than a woman.
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