He opened the hall-door—saying adieu to neither father nor sisters—leaped on his horse, and was gone.
“Agatha, Agatha; where are you running? He is far down the road by this time. Come in, do! Are you so very reluctant to be left for a few hours alone?”
“Oh, no! Oh, no!” And Agatha went back to the drawing-room with her sisters-in-law.
Alone! The word she had repudiated rose up like a spirit, everywhere, all over the house. Not a room but what seemed empty, strange. Fast and busily the Miss Harpers talked—yet all around was, oh! such silence. The silence that we feel in a house when some voice and step has gone out of it, which no one misses except we, and which we miss as we should miss the daylight or the sun.
When all grew quiet, and Agatha sat in her own room—expecting nothing, for she knew he would not come—but still sitting, with her hair falling damp about her, and her eyes fixed on the mirror for company, yet half growing frightened as if it were a strange object on which she gazed—then, indeed, there was silence—then, indeed, she was alone.
CHAPTER XIX.
Mr. Harper did not ride home by midnight, as his wife was well assured he would not do, though with some idle hope put into her mind by Eulalie, she sat at the window until the stars whitened in the dawn.
At noon—which seemed to come slowly, every hour a day—Mr. Dugdale appeared with a message, which by some wondrous good fortune he remembered to deliver—that Nathanael had returned from Weymouth to Kingcombe, and was waiting there. Agatha gathered with difficulty that her husband wished her to return with Mr. Dugdale.
“I will not go.”