Her Faithful Knight — page 212: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

208 A Shadow on the Window. Thin to emaciation, anaemic and nerveless, she lay all day on a sofa drawn close to the sitting-room fire, reading, or pretending to read, the novels with which Dorothy kept her supplied. Constant neuralgia and sleeplessness had begun to turn her hair gray, and, weeping bitter tears over her lost beauty, poor Phyllis went back to her golden hair- dye, which lent to her pallid cheeks and great, sunken, black-fringed eyes a peculiarly haggard and witch-like look. Often now in the evenings, when Dorothy, after a long day at painting small oil panels by the dozen, started for her night work at secretaryship, Phyllis would rise from her couch and would stealthily creep from the cot- tage, returning in about half-an-hour’s time with dilated eyes and cheeks that were faintly flushed, to throw her- self upon the sofa and fall into a heavy sleep. Her temper, formerly sweet if a little capricious, grew daily more capricious and fretful. Unlike Dorothy in _ this, as in so many other things, Phyllis had what is called “no resources in herself.” Lacking amusement, excite- ‘ment and admiration, she had been subject to fits of in- tense depression even in past days of perfect: physical health; but now that she was far too weak and ill to act, and could only brood over her ruined life and cruel wrongs, her melancholy became intensified until it bor- dered on insanity. : Dorothy understood her sister with the intuition of per- fect love and sympathy. Phyllis had always been a little selfish and dependent upon others, and these qualities had become confirmed in her by Dorothy’s entire unselfishness, as well as by her superior energy and intelligence. Throughout the chilly autumn and the fogs of early win- ter, Dorothy had worked from daybreak until bedtime, giving lessons in music and French and drawing to the children of Acton tradespeople, tinting photographs, trac- ing designs for fancy work, or copying manuscripts, until, EOomichboo <S (E(0)