“Agatha, come home.”
Again she tried to burst from him and fly, but her arm was caught, and Marmaduke Dugdale's grave look—the look he fixed upon his own children when they erred, constraining them always into repentance and goodness—was reading her inmost soul.
“Go home, poor child! I'll not tell of you or him. Go home with your husband.”
She felt her hand laid, or grasped—she knew not which—in that of Nathanael; who held it with invincible firmness. There was no resisting that clasp. She rose up and followed him, as if led by an invisible chain. Her madness had passed, and left only a dull indifference to everything. The die was cast; she had laid open the miseries of their home, had disgraced him and herself before the world. It signified little where she went or what she did; they were utterly separated now.
Without again speaking, or taking notice of Mr. Dugdale, she suffered Nathanael to lead her away, passing swiftly down the silent streets. Neither husband nor wife uttered a single word.
The moment she entered the house she walked up-stairs, slowly, that he might not see her tottering; went into her own room, and locked her door with a loud, fierce turning of the key, that seemed to shriek as it turned.
There, for almost an hour, she sat motionless. The maid, half asleep, came to the door with a light, but Agatha bade her set it down, and sat in the dark. Dark—altogether dark, within and without; with no hope or repentance, or even the heroism of suffering; wrathful, sullen, miserable; wronged—yet conscious that she had sinned as much as she was sinned against; seeing her husband and herself stand as it were on either edge of a black gulf, hourly widening, yet neither having strength to plunge it to the other's side.
Here she sat, upright and still, body and soul wrapped in a leaden, shroud-like darkness, until gradually a stupor possessed her brain.
“I am so tired,” she murmured, “I must go to sleep. He will not leave till to-morrow. But it does not signify. Nothing signifies. I must go to sleep.”
She unlocked the door and drew in the candle, flaring in its socket. She had to press her fingers on her eyeballs before they could bear the light, all was so very dark. She Sotted her hair up anyhow, took off her clothes, and crept to bed, almost as if she were creeping to her tomb. The fragment of candle went out, sinking instantaneously, like a soul quenched out of existence, and all was total darkness. In that darkness a heavy hand seemed to lay itself on Agatha's brain, and press down her eyelids. Scarcely two minutes after, she was asleep.