Elizabeth drew back keenly disappointed. The young man seemed unconscious of her presence; yet they had not seen each other for weeks. She turned proudly, and went into the house. The movement aroused Lovel. He withdrew his eyes from the retreating form of Barbara Stafford, to which they seemed drawn by some fascination, and followed the young girl, unconscious that he had done any thing to wound or offend her.
Elizabeth sat down in the oaken chair, that had belonged to her mother. She could not understand the iron feelings that crept over her.
"Has that woman's shadow chilled all the love from my heart as well as his?" she said to herself. "Am I too bewitched?"
CHAPTER XXXIV.
TOWARD THE SHORE.
This word made the idea, that had haunted her so long, painfully tangible. The young girl began to shudder at the thoughts that crowded upon her. All the feelings, connected with her love of this young man, had been strange from the first. So much of pain was mingled with its sweetness, so much of passion, temper, and the bitter tears which spring from both, that she could not comprehend them. The very development of her own nature, under the workings of a passion utterly unknown to her before, had something mysterious in it, which aroused ideas of some supernatural power, checking and thwarting it into a wild pain.
Barbara Stafford had undoubtedly connected herself with the evil power, which sometimes held her heart girded like a vice, and again forced the young creature to throw herself upon the woman's bosom in a paroxysm of regretful tenderness.
Why was she to love or hate Barbara Stafford, a woman she had never seen till within the last few weeks—a stranger wrecked upon the shore, and cast up, as it were, from the foam of the ocean, without a history, and it might prove without a true name. If it must be that their destinies jostled each other, why could it not be all love or entire hate?
Elizabeth Parris sat still, thinking these things over, while Norman Lovel was talking to her of the friends she had so lately left. He brought a score of sweet messages from Lady Phipps, and kindly remembrances from the governor himself. He spoke of the loneliness that fell upon the family when its guests had departed; but after his words to Barbara Stafford, any thing he could say to her seemed cold and common-place. Without knowing it, Elizabeth was possessed of that proud hunger, which every true woman feels, when she really loves—that craving desire to be all or nothing, which makes so many noble hearts miserable.