"I am going somewhere—this way, I think. One cannot rest here, you know," she said, with a wan and most pathetic smile. "You and I have been too much in company—the world is wide—oh, misery, misery, how wide—but you can go that way and I the other. No one will ask for me."
Was the woman dropping into piteous insanity?
North thought so, and made another effort to arouse her, but she only entreated him to go away, and at last he went; afraid that the daylight would find him there.
CHAPTER LXV.
THE HUSBAND RELENTS.
Grantley Mellen turned back to the miserable grandeur of his home. The proud heart ached in his bosom. What if, from fear or weakness, Elizabeth did not return to the house? What if she remained there among the cold graves, or wandered off in terror of his wrath?
The graveyard was full half a mile from the spot where this thought struck him. He turned at once and went back, feeling how unmanly it was to leave the miserable creature stricken with such anguish, alone with that man. He remembered how her uncovered head had drooped under his denunciations in the moonlight, that the cold wind had lifted the waves of her hair and revealed the dead marble of a face in which all hope was quenched. Notwithstanding his wrongs, notwithstanding the ache at his heart, he would go back and take her home for that one night—only for that one night.
He walked rapidly towards the graveyard, more eager now to find Elizabeth than he had been to separate from her only a brief time before. He looked to the right and left in search of her, but the moon was obscured now by thin gray clouds, and a fog drifting up from the ocean was fast obliterating the crowd of golden stars that had been so brilliant when he went forth.
Mellen walked on, growing more and more anxious, till he came in sight of the graveyard, then he paused under a clump of cedars; for he saw his unhappy wife forcing her way, in desperate haste, through the broken pickets of the fence, with her face turned homewards. The gray woollen shawl was floating loosely around her, giving a weird ghostliness to her appearance.