the bowed human form
beside him. When he did, there was no mistaking the compassionate voice.

"Eh, poor soul! What's wrong wi'ee?"

Agatha sprang up with a cry. There were two standing by her, from whose
presence she would gladly have run to the world's end--Mr. Dugdale and
her husband. The one remained petrified with astonishment--the other
said but three words, in a dull mechanical voice, as if every feeling
had been struck out of the man by some thunderbolt of doom.

"Agatha, come home."

Again she tried to burst from him and fly, but her arm was caught, and
Marmaduke Dugdale's grave look--the look he fixed upon his own
children when they erred, constraining them always into repentance and
goodness--was reading her inmost soul.

"Go home, poor child! I'll not tell of you or him. Go home with your
husband."

She felt her hand laid, or grasped--she knew not which--in that of
Nathanael; who held it with invincible firmness. There was no resisting
that clasp. She rose up and followed him, as if led by an invisible
chain. Her madness had passed, and left only a dull indifference to
everything. The die was cast; she had laid open the miseries of their
home, had disgraced him and herself before the world. It signified
little where she went or what she did; they were utterly separated now.

Without again speaking, or taking notice of Mr. Dugdale, she suffered
Nathanael to lead her away, passing swiftly down the silent streets.
Neither husband nor wife uttered a single word.

The moment she entered the house she walked up-stairs, slowly, that he
might not see her tottering; went into her own room, and locked her
door with a loud, fierce turning of the key, that seemed to shriek as it
turned.

There, for almost an hour, she sat motionless. The maid, half asleep,
came to the door with a light, but Agatha bade her set it down, and sat
in the dark. Dark--altogether dark, within and without; with no hope
or repentance, or even the heroism of suffering; wrathful, sullen,
miserable; wronged--yet conscious that she had sinned as much as she
was sinned against; seeing her husband and herself stand as it were
on either edge of a black gulf, hourly widening, yet neither having
strength to plunge it to the other's side.

Here she sat, upright and still, body and soul wrapped in a leaden,
shroud-like darkness, until gradually a stupor possessed her brain.

"I am so tired," she murmured, "I must go to sleep. He will not leav