Rebecca began to snatch at paragraphs here and there through the story, which was entitled The Desecration of the Hearth. There was one passage which seemed to hold an unaccountable fascination as her eyes lingered over it:
"Then suddenly, and without a minute's warning, Lord Archibald Molyneux dashed the poor, ruined girl from him, and soon she was struggling for life in the swirling stream.
"'Ah-a-ha!' he said once more, hissing out his every word between his thin, cruel lips. 'That will may be put an end to your scandalous allegations against a scion of the noble house of Molyneux.'
"'Mercy! Pity! Oh, God! The Child!' she wailed piteously as she felt herself being caught in the maelstrom of the current.
"But Lord Archibald Molyneux merely twirled his dark, handsome mustache with his white hands, after the fashion that was peculiar to him, and waited until his unfortunate victim had disappeared completely beneath the surface of the water."
Rebecca's eyes had closed over the passage, and she was dozing now, but only fitfully.... To occupy small instants would come the most terrifying dreams in long waves of horror which would seem to take great spaces of time for their final passage from her mind. Then there would flow in a brief space of respite, but only as a prelude to the dread recurrence of her dreams again. And all jumbled together, bits of wild reality which were and were not parts of her experience would cause her to start up ever and anon.
There fell a knock upon the door, and a little girl came in with some tea-things on a tray. She called: "Miss Kerr, your tea!" and when Rebecca woke up with a terrible start it appeared as if she had not slumbered at all.
"Oh, is that yourself, Euphemia? I declare to goodness the dusk is falling outside. I must have been sleeping."
"Yes, miss!"
"You are late in coming this evening?"
"Well, wait till I tell you, miss. I went into the village for some things for my mother, and what d'ye think but when I was coming home I thought I saw a strange man just outside the ditch opposite the door, and I was afraid for to pass, so I was."
"A strange man! Is that a fact?"
"Well, sure then I thought, miss, it might be Ulick Shannon, but I may tell you I got the surprise of my life when I found it was only John Brennan, and he standing there alone by himself looking up at your window."