She began to see things. The chief thing was a sort of vision of how
Emily would have looked lying in the depths of the water among the
weeds. Her brown hair would have broken loose, and perhaps tangled
itself over her white face. Would her eyes be open and glazed, or half
shut? And her childish smile, the smile that looked so odd on the face
of a full-grown woman, would it have been fixed and seemed to confront
the world of life with a meek question as to what she had done to
people--why she had been drowned? Hester felt sure that was what her
helpless stillness would have expressed.

How happy the woman had been! To see her go about with her unconsciously
joyous eyes had sometimes been maddening. And yet, poor thing! why had
she not the right to be happy? She was always trying to please people
and help them. She was so good that she was almost silly. The day she
had brought the little things from London to The Kennel Farm, Hester
remembered that, despite her own morbid resentment, she had ended by
kissing her with repentant tears. She heard again, in the midst of her
delirious thoughts, the nice, prosaic emotion of her voice as she said:

"_Don't_ thank me--don't. Just let us _enjoy_ ourselves."

And she might have been lying among the long, thick weeds of the pond.
And it would not have been the accident it would have appeared to be. Of
that she felt sure. Brought face to face with this definiteness of
situation, she began to shudder.

She went out into the night feeling that she wanted air. She was not
strong enough to stand the realisation that she had become part of a web
into which she had not meant to be knitted. No; she had had her
passionate and desperate moments, but she had not meant things like
this. She had almost hoped that disaster might befall, she had almost
thought it possible that she would do nothing to prevent it--almost. But
some things were too bad.

She felt small and young and hopelessly evil as she walked in the dark
along a grass path to a seat under a tree. The very stillness of the
night was a horror to her, especially when once an owl called, and again
a dreaming bird cried in its nest.

She sat under the tree in the dark for at least an hour. The thick
shadow of the drooping branches hid her in actual blackness and
seclusion.

She said to herself later that some one of the occult powers she
believed in had made her go out and sit in this particular spot, because
there was a thi