"A sort of epileptic fit," said the village doctor rather vaguely to the squire as he met him at the church door after the service. "Poor thing! I wonder who she is. We took her home to her lodgings. It seems she's been here about two weeks. The landlady says she's been very strange and in low spirits till to-day, when a letter cheered her up. There's the danger of sudden reaction and excitement, you see," rubbing his hands and winking with one eye in a knowing way at the squire, who himself was a choleric man, with a tendency to apoplexy.
Endowed with a vigorous constitution, she soon recovered from the effects of the seizure, whatever it was.
But she could not shake off the terror. The Furies would not let her go.
She felt that she must go mad if this continued. She even contemplated suicide.
Then she took to opium, and was never without a bottle of laudanum in her pocket, from which she would take frequent sips.
Yet she knew that she was quite safe. She tried to prove this to herself. She tried to laugh away her senseless fears, but it was no good. The horrors will not give way to logic.
Though human law could not punish her, she suffered enough in all conscience to satisfy those strictest lovers of retributive justice who would require even more than a tooth for a tooth.
A month of this condition robbed her of a considerable portion of her beauty. Her peachy complexion was no more; her cheeks were sunken and sallow; and the crows' feet about her eyes were as those of a woman twice her age.
Curiously enough, it was the very loss of beauty which at last brought about her recovery, and prevented her from becoming a hopeless lunatic.