Brime sighed deeply, and went away slowly without another word.
“Poor fellow,” said the woman softly, “better for him to jump into the sea than to go on thinking about that.”
She stood for a few moments with her hands to her forehead, as if to dull the excitement from which she was suffering, uttering a low moan from time to time.
“How horrible!” she gasped. “It seems more than I can bear. Poor child, if she was to hear!”
She stood staring before her at last, with her lips moving, and her eyes fixed upon the darkness in the farther corner of the room, as if she saw something there.
“I cannot bear it,” she muttered at last; and hurriedly passing out, she hurried up to her room, and threw herself upon her knees by the bedside.
How long she remained there she did not know. Suddenly she started up, believing that she heard voices below.
“They will have heard it, perhaps,” she said excitedly; and, hurrying out, she found that the two servants who had been out had returned, and were talking quickly.
Sarah Woodham turned cold with apprehension, under the impression that the women were retailing the scandal they had heard to their mistress, and she uttered a sigh of relief as she heard Mary Dillon say quickly—
“And they are talking about it everywhere you say?”