Then a look of passionate distress came to that dark face, and, going to a marble table, on which a silver bowl and pitcher stood, she poured some water into the bowl, and plunged the hand with which she had touched that sleeping man into it. The splash of the water aroused him, and its icy coldness shocked the woman out of her unnatural sleep. She turned around wildly, with the water dripping from her hands—turned to find herself in her husband's chamber, with his astonished eyes fixed upon her as he sat up in bed.
"Rachael!"
She did not answer him, but stood gazing around the room in wild bewilderment. How came she standing there? By what spirit of love or hate had she been sent to that silver basin?
"Rachael, is anything wrong? Are you ill?"
The woman began to shiver. Perhaps the ice cold water had chilled her.
She looked down upon her hands as if the red shadow haunted her yet, but all she saw were drops of pure water rolling down her slender fingers, and falling one by one to the floor.
"I do not know!" she answered, in cold bewilderment. "Something drove me out from the bed, and sent me wandering, wandering, wandering! But how I came here, alas! Norton, I cannot tell you."
Rachael shivered all over as she spoke, and, as if drawn that way by some unseen force, came close to Lord Hope's bed, and sat down upon it.
"Oh, I am so cold—so dreary cold!"
An eider down quilt lay across the foot of the bed. Lord Hope reached forward and folded it around her, very gently, murmuring: