The Fatal Three, Volume II by Mary Elizabeth Braddon

It was nearly eleven o'clock when Mrs. Greswold arrived at Waterloo. There had been half-an-hour's delay at Bishopstoke, where she changed trains, and the journey had seemed interminable to the over-strained brain of that solitary traveller. Never before had she so journeyed, never during the fourteen years of her married life had she sat behind an engine that was carrying her away from her husband. No words could speak that agony of severance, or express the gloom of the future-stretching before her in one dead-level of desolation-which was to be spent away from him.

"If I were a Roman Catholic I would go into a convent to-morrow; I would lock myself for ever from the outer world," she thought, feeling that the world could be nothing to her without her husband.