of these tidings would be too much for him, if he did not share them with some one. So he made up his mind that he must tell them to her—though to no other one.
'I must tell her,' he said.
'Oh yes,' she replied; and he felt her hand tremble in his, and dropped it. He had forgotten that he thus held her as all these thought pressed upon his brain.
'I will tell it to her, but to no one else. If I might advise you, I would say that it will be well for you now to take some rest. You are agitated, and———'
'Agitated! yes. But you are right, Sir Peregrine. I will go at once to my room. And then———'
'Then, perhaps,—in the course of the morning, you will see me again.'
'Where?—will you come to me there?'
'I will see you in her room, in her dressing-room. She will be down stairs, you know.' From which last words the tidings were conveyed to Lady Mason that she was not to see Mrs. Orme again.
And then she went, and as she slowly made her way across the hall she felt that all of evil, all of punishment that she had ever anticipated, had now fallen upon her. There are periods in the lives of some of us—I trust but of few—when, with the silent inner voice of suffering, we call on the mountains to fall and crush us, and on the earth to gape open and take us in. When, with an agony of intensity, we wish that our mothers had been barren. In those moments the poorest and most desolate are objects to us of envy, for their sufferings can be as nothing to our own. Lady Mason, as she crept silently across the hall, saw a servant girl pass down towards the entrance to the kitchen, and would have given all, all that she had in the world, to have changed places with that girl. But no change was possible to her. Neither would the mountains crush her, nor would the earth take her in. There was her burden, and she must bear it to the end. There was the bed which she had made for herself, and she must lie upon it. No escape was possible to her. She had herself mixed the cup, and she must now drink of it to the dregs.
Slowly and very silently she made her way up to her own room, and having closed the door behind her sat herself down upon the bed. It was as yet early in the morning, and the servant had not been in the chamber. There was no fire there although it was still mid-winter. Of such details as these Sir Peregrine had rememered nothing when he recommended her to go to her own room. Nor did she think of them at first as she placed herself on the bedside. But soon the bitter air pierced her through and through, and she shivered with the cold as she sat there. After a while she got herself a shawl, wrapped it close around her, and then sat down
