While Alden Lytton was thus gaining fame and fortune, Mary Grey was engaged in mystifying the minds and winning the sympathy and compassion of all her acquaintances.
From the time of her return from Philadelphia she had exhibited a deep and incurable melancholy.
Everybody pitied her deeply and wondered what could be the secret sorrow under which she was suffering.
But when any friend more curious than the rest ventured to question her, she answered:
"I have borne and am still bearing the deepest wrong that any woman can suffer and survive. But I must not speak of it now. My hands are bound and my tongue is tied. But the time may come when a higher duty than that which restrains me now may force me to speak. Until then I must be mute."
This was extremely tantalizing to all her friends; but it was all that could be got from her.
Meanwhile her face faded into a deadlier pallor and her form wasted to a ghastlier thinness. And this was real, for she was demon-haunted—a victim of remorse, not a subject of repentance.
The specter that she had feared to look upon on the fatal night of her crime—the pale, dripping form of her betrayed and murdered lover—was ever before her mind's eye.
If she entered a solitary or a half-darkened room the phantasm lurked in the shadowy corners or met her face to face.
It came to her bedside in the dead of night and laid its clammy wet hand upon her sleeping brow. And when she woke in wild affright it met her transfixed and horrified gaze.