What if at last the long anguish had destroyed the fair mind? What if a dull horror was to swamp their hopes for ever? If—if—She dared not look this last woe in the face. Impulsively she pressed on, her trembling limbs endowed with a new strength, her young heart breathing out its resolves upon the night: "I will save her—I. Great God, in Thy mercy help me."
She had come to a turn in the road. Rounding it, she made an eager bound forward, for there through the darkness she could distinguish at last the outlines of Margaret's form.
Pressing her hands to her head, Adèle tried to think. If only the old nurse had been with her, or their landlady! How was she to act? how in her single strength to arrest and bring back the fugitive?
Yet there was something in Margaret's gliding movement which made the girl think rather of somnambulism than of delirium. If this should be the cause of her flight Adèle knew that a sudden awakening might possibly be dangerous to health or reason.
Struggling with her terror, trying to come to some right conclusion, she at last reached her friend. Close by was a little path which Adèle and Margaret know well. It led off from the road, through a wilderness of stunted grass and tangled weeds, to the sea.
Here Margaret paused a moment, as if in hesitation. During that moment's pause Adèle looked at her fixedly. The young girl's last suspicion had been true. By the wide-open, sightless eyes, by the groping of the hands, by the soft, continuous murmuring of the lips, she saw her friend was asleep.
Straining her ears, she distinguished through the moaning wind and sobbing sea some of the words that were falling from Margaret's lips. "Which way?" And then groping forward, with that blind, pitiful movement of the hands, "To the sea? Cold, so cold, but," with a smile that made Adèle weep, "Maurice is there."
As she spoke, Margaret turned into the winding path, and Adèle shivered. What awful dream was bewildering her brain?
Throwing her arm gently round the sleeper, she tried to draw her back to the road.
"Maurice is here," she said in a tone as dreamy as her own; "come."