As for Isabel, if Gundred ever recalled her name now, it was with a feeling of wrath that grew steadily towards hatred. Isabel stood for the one moment in which Gundred had faltered, in which she had not been sure of herself. Isabel was a painful memory, not only as recalling that far-off period of unrest, but also as raking back into recollection that one awful instant in which Gundred’s courage had failed her--with results so disastrous for poor Isabel. Had the results not been quite so disastrous for Isabel, Gundred could better perhaps have borne the recollection. As it was, they convicted her of inadequacy, and touched her secret pride in its tender point. She pushed such horrid reflections far back in the most private cupboards of her consciousness, and hated Isabel anew whenever accident compelled her to open the locked doors and turn over those dreadful bones of her one failure.
But Gundred had great skill in ignoring all unwelcome topics; it was very rarely that she remembered her cousin, and all the dim, remote unpleasantnesses that Isabel represented. Her first year of married life now loomed down upon her out of the distant past as a confused nightmare-mirage of desert wanderings, from which her nice tact and the favour of Heaven had brought her feet at last out into the Canaan of prosperity, conjugal and social. The few brief sorrows of the past assumed gigantic proportions in the haze of memory, and Isabel was their incarnation. Gundred began to realise how directly Heaven had intervened to relieve her of her cousin’s threatening presence, and, though grateful for the service, it was to her credit that she retained humanity enough to think the means adopted unnecessarily drastic. This tenderness greatly elevated Gundred in her own eyes. She remonstrated with Heaven--not acrimoniously, indeed, but with feeling, and devoted many prayers to Isabel’s happiness in another world. But she rejoiced over Isabel’s removal from this, and nothing could have given her serenity a greater shock than any suspicion that her husband ever remembered the dead woman with tenderness or longing. However, she was protected from such perceptions as much by her own impermeability to unwelcome truths as by her husband’s perpetual skill.