And beat at the fast-closed door;
'Oh, let me in to the kindly light,
Give back to me days of yore.'
But an angel says, with a frowning brow,
'The past can no power restore,
You must dwell in the outer darkness now
For ever and ever more.'"
Through the warm summer night, her heart filled with rage, humiliation, and despair, fled the unhappy woman, whither she knew not. All she wanted was to escape from Thornstream, lest her husband, seeing her by chance, should break his word and tell Kaituna what she was. If he did so--oh, the horror of it for her daughter to know that the mother whose memory she reverenced was alive, and an unhappy, fallen creature! A thousand fiends seemed to shriek in her ears as she ran onward, and it was only when she came against the trunk of a tree and fell half-stunned on the cool grass that she stopped in her mad career.
How cool was the delicate touch of the grass, how sweet the perfume of the flowers. She buried her hot face among the primroses, and pressed her aching breast against the chill bosom of the earth to still the agonised throbbing of her heart.
Under the great tree she lay in an exhausted condition, thinking of her failure to conciliate Pethram, of the past with all its follies, of the present with its pain, and the future which looked so hopeless and dreary.