"It is really very unseasonable weather—there is snow in the atmosphere. I don't wonder it pinches Miriam," said Paul Douglass.
Ah! they did not either of them know that it was a spiritual fever and ague alternately burning and freezing her very heart's blood—hope and fear, love and loathing, pity and horror, that striving together made a pandemonium of her young bosom. Like a flight of fiery arrows came the coincidences of the tale she had heard, and the facts she knew. That spring, eight years before, Mr. Murray said he had, unseen, witnessed the marriage of Thurston Willcoxen and Marian. That spring, eight years before, she knew Mr. Willcoxen and Miss Mayfield had been together on a visit to the capital. Thurston had gone to Europe, Marian had returned home, but had never seemed the same since her visit to the city. The very evening of the house-warming at Luckenough, where Marian had betrayed so much emotion, Thurston had suddenly returned, and presented himself at that mansion. Yet in all the months that followed she had never seen Thurston and Marian together, Thurston was paying marked and constant attention to Miss Le Roy, while Marian's heart was consuming with a secret sorrow and anxiety that she refused to communicate even to Edith. How distinctly came back to her mind those nights when, lying by Marian's side, she had put her hand over upon her face and felt the tears on her cheeks. Those tears! The recollection of them now, and in this connection, filled her heart with indescribable emotion. Her mother, too, had died in the belief that Marian had fallen by the hands of her lover or her husband. Lastly, upon the same night of Marian's murder, Thurston Willcoxen had been unaccountably absent, during the whole night, from the deathbed of his grandfather. And then his incurable melancholy from that day to this—his melancholy augmented to anguish at the annual return of this season.
And then rising, in refutation of all this evidence, was his own irreproachable life and elevated character.
Ah! but she had, young, as she was, heard of such cases before—how in some insanity of selfishness or frenzy of passion, a crime had been perpetrated by one previously and afterward irreproachable in conduct. Piercing wound after wound smote these thoughts like swift coming arrows.
A young, immature woman, a girl of seventeen, in whose warm nature passion and imagination so largely predominated over intellect, was but too liable to have her reason shaken from its seat by the ordeal through which she was forced to go.
As night descended, and they drew near Dell-Delight, the storm that had been lowering all the afternoon came upon them. The wind, the hail, and the snow, and the snow-drifts continually forming, rendered the roads, that were never very good, now nearly impassable.
More and more obstructed, difficult and unrecognizable became their way, until at last, when within an eighth of a mile from the house, the horses stepped off the road into a covered gully, and the carriage was over-turned and broken.
"Miriam! dear Miriam! dear child, are you hurt?" was the first anxious exclamation of both gentlemen.
No one was injured; the coach lay upon its left side, and the right side door was over their heads. Paul climbed out first, and then gave his hand to Miriam, whom Mr. Willcoxen assisted up to the window. Lastly followed Thurston. The horses had kicked themselves free of the carriage and stood kicking yet.
"Two wheels and the pole are broken—nothing can be done to remove the carriage to-night. You had better leave the horses where they are, Paul, and let us hurry on to get Miriam under shelter first, then we can send some one to fetch them home."