He was preparing to gather up his papers for his accustomed trip down-town, but he stopped as I spoke, and looked at me curiously.
"You are pale," he remarked, "change and travel will benefit you. Dearest, we will try to sail for Europe in a week."
CHAPTER V
THE STOLEN KEY
It became apparent even to my girlish mind, that, as the wife of the man who had committed this great and inconceivable wrong, I was bound, not only to make an immediate attempt to release the women he so outrageously held imprisoned in their own house, but to release them so that he should escape the opprobrium of his own act.
That I might have time to think, and that I might be saved, if but for one day, contact with one it was almost my duty to hate, I came back to him with the plea that I might spend the day with the Vandykes instead of accompanying him down-town as usual. I think he was glad of the freedom my absence offered him, for he gave me the permission I asked, and in ten minutes I was in my old home. Mrs. Vandyke received me with effusion. It was not the first time she had seen me since my marriage, but it was the first time she had seen me alone.
"My dear!" she exclaimed, turning me about till my unwilling face met the light, "is this the wild-wood lassie I gave into Mr. Allison's keeping a week ago!"
"It is the house!" I excitedly gasped, "the empty, lonely, echoing house! I am afraid in it, even with my husband. It gives me creepy feelings, as if a murder had been committed in it."
She broke into a laugh; I hear the sound now, an honest, amused and entirely reassuring laugh, that relieved me in one way and depressed me in another.