ightedly; "I
know nothing about it!"

"Yes," I said, "you wrote it, and you know about it. It was wrong to
send such a letter, it was wrong to frighten Miss Fairlie. If you had
anything to say that it was right and necessary for her to hear, you
should have gone yourself to Limmeridge House--you should have spoken
to the young lady with your own lips."

She crouched down over the flat stone of the grave, till her face was
hidden on it, and made no reply.

"Miss Fairlie will be as good and kind to you as her mother was, if you
mean well," I went on. "Miss Fairlie will keep your secret, and not
let you come to any harm. Will you see her to-morrow at the farm?
Will you meet her in the garden at Limmeridge House?"

"Oh, if I could die, and be hidden and at rest with YOU!" Her lips
murmured the words close on the grave-stone, murmured them in tones of
passionate endearment, to the dead remains beneath. "You know how I
love your child, for your sake! Oh, Mrs. Fairlie! Mrs. Fairlie! tell me
how to save her. Be my darling and my mother once more, and tell me
what to do for the best."

I heard her lips kissing the stone--I saw her hands beating on it
passionately. The sound and the sight deeply affected me. I stooped
down, and took the poor helpless hands tenderly in mine, and tried to
soothe her.

It was useless. She snatched her hands from me, and never moved her
face from the stone. Seeing the urgent necessity of quieting her at
any hazard and by any means, I appealed to the only anxiety that she
appeared to feel, in connection with me and with my opinion of her--the
anxiety to convince me of her fitness to be mistress of her own actions.

"Come, come," I said gently. "Try to compose yourself, or you will
make me alter my opinion of you. Don't let me think that the person
who put you in the Asylum might have had some excuse----"

The next words died away on my lips. The instant I risked that chance
reference to the person who had put her in the Asylum she sprang up on
her knees. A most extraordinary and startling change passed over her.
Her face, at all ordinary times so touching to look at, in its nervous
sensitiveness, weakness, and uncertainty, became suddenly darkened by
an expression of maniacally intense hatred and fear, which communicated
a wild, unnatural force to every feature. Her eyes dilated in the dim
evening light, like the eyes of a wild animal. She caught up the cloth
that had fallen