reeling; the light within streamed out an instant on
the road and the common; then the pursuing rain and darkness fell upon
him.

She was drawing back when, with sudden horror, she perceived something
else close beside her, pressing against the window. A woman's face!--the
powerful black and white of it--the strong aquiline features--the mad
keenness of the look were all plain to her. The eyes looked in hungrily
at the prostrate form on the settle--at the sleeping child. Another
figure appeared out of the dark, running up the path. There was a slight
scuffle, and voices outside. Marcella drew the curtain close with a
hasty hand, and sat down hardly able to breathe. The woman who had
looked in was Isabella Westall. It was said that she was becoming more
and more difficult to manage and to watch.

Marcella was some time in recovering herself. That look, as of a
sleepless, hateful eagerness, clung to the memory. Once or twice, as it
haunted her, she got up again to make sure that the door was fast.

The incident, with all it suggested, did but intensify the horror and
struggle in which the girl stood, made her mood more strained, more
piercingly awake and alert. Gradually, as the hours passed, as all
sounds from without, even that of the wind, died away, and the silence
settled round her in ever-widening circles, like deep waters sinking to
repose, Marcella felt herself a naked soul, alone on a wide sea, with
shapes of pain and agony and revolt. She looked at the sleeping wife.
"He, too, is probably asleep," she thought, remembering some information
which a kindly warder had given her in a few jerky, well-meant
sentences, while she was waiting downstairs in the gaol for Minta Hurd.
"Incredible! only so many hours, minutes left--so far as any mortal
_knows_--of living, thinking, recollecting, of all that makes us
something as against the _nothing_ of death--and a man wastes them in
sleep, in that which is only meant for the ease and repair of the daily
struggle. And Minta--her husband is her all--to-morrow she will have no
husband; yet she sleeps, and I have helped to make her. Ah! Nature may
well despise and trample on us; there is no reason in us--no dignity!
Oh, why are we here--why am _I_ here--to ache like this--to hate good
people like Charles Harden and Mary--to refuse all I could give--to
madden myself over pain I can never help? I cannot help it, yet I cannot
forsake it; it drives, it clings to me!"

She sat ov