ht an interview with the curate in his
study, and told him every thing he had told Mr. Drake. The story seemed
to explain a good deal more than it did, leaving the curate with the
conviction that the disclosure of this former relation had caused the
quarrel between him and his wife, and more doubtful than ever as to
Juliet's having committed suicide.

CHAPTER LI.

THE NEW OLD HOUSE.

It was a lovely moon-lighted midnight when they set out, the four of
them, to walk from the gate across the park to the Old House. Like
shadows they flitted over the green sward, all silent as shadows.
Scarcely a word was spoken as they went, and the stray syllable now and
then, was uttered softly as in the presence of the dead. Suddenly but
gently opened in Juliet's mind a sense of the wonder of life. The moon,
having labored through a heap of cloud into a lake of blue, seemed to
watch her with curious interest as she toiled over the level sward. The
air now and then made a soundless sigh about her head, like a waft of
wings invisible. The heavenly distances seemed to have come down and
closed her softly in. All at once, as if waked from an eternity of
unconsciousness, she found herself, by no will of her own, with no power
to say nay, present to herself--a target for sorrow to shoot at, a tree
for the joy-birds to light upon and depart--a woman, scorned of the man
she loved, bearing within her another life, which by no will of its own,
and with no power to say nay, must soon become aware of its own joys and
sorrows, and have no cause to bless her for her share in its being. Was
there no one to answer for it? Surely there must be a heart-life
somewhere in the universe, to whose will the un-self-willed life could
refer for the justification of its existence, for its motive, for the
idea of it that should make it seem right to itself--to whom it could
cry to have its divergence from that idea rectified! Was she not now,
she thought, upon her silent way to her own deathbed, walking, walking,
the phantom of herself, in her own funeral? What if, when the
bitterness of death was past, and her child was waking in this world,
she should be waking in another, to a new life, inevitable as the
former--another, yet the same? We know not whence we came--why may we
not be going whither we know not? We did not know we were coming here,
why may we not be going there without knowing it--this much more
open-eyed, more aware that we know we do not