Dennis followed him, but as they left the spot he said: "It war like Deely's voice, Sylv. She saved me, this time."
CHAPTER IV.
A VISION.
That which Adela had seen and overheard so startled and horrified her, it raised such a war of emotions, that she was unable to reflect upon what she ought to do. In coming through the woods, obedient to the vague need she felt of following Dennis, she had heard the rising voices of the disputants, and when she reached a spot where she could command a view, she beheld her lover with his gun raised, on the very verge of committing murder.
For a moment her every faculty was paralyzed. Had the weapon been levelled at herself, her dread would have been less freezing: she could have been brave and active on her own behalf. To see another person threatened with mortal danger, and he the brother of Dennis, was different. In the presence of impending crimes, human beings seem to yield to a painless lethargy like that which is said to overcome the victim of a tiger, even before the claws have made a single wound. The extreme of terror suspends the faculty of feeling, as of action; and this is what renders possible the enactment of the most dreadful deeds in broad day, before a crowd of witnesses.
To shriek would have been the easy resource of some women. Adela Reefe did not know how to shriek. She might have bounded forward, to stay Dennis's hand or divert his aim; but her muscles failed her as if they had been caught and webbed with invisible cords. Besides, any sudden movement might have resulted only in precipitating a tragic end.
Just then it was that Sylv called out; and Adela echoed him, half-unconsciously, but with a wilder earnestness. The two exclamations dissolved the spell that had held her. The crisis was over, and the catastrophe had been warded off. What was she to do next? If she appeared, the effect of her sharp outcry might be lost; Dennis might be maddened to some fresh outbreak worse than the first, by the knowledge that she had seen him in that awful situation. The difficulties, the quarrel that might ensue, were she to confront the brothers then, would be full of peril. There was nothing for it but to hide; and, gliding from tree to tree, she made her escape.
It was a long time before she finally reached her father's house at Hunting Quarters that night; for, driven by the agitation which followed the episode in the woods, and troubled by a cloud of doubts, wonders, and anxieties that rose upon her mind, she wandered restlessly along the shore, as homeless and unfettered as the marsh-ponies that were tossing their manes above the dim, low line of that outer strip of land which, across the Sound, ran out thirty or forty miles under the evening sky toward Ocracoke and Hatteras.
Now it happened that Mr. Edward Lance, the guest at Colonel Floyd's, had been out on a solitary excursion of scientific inquiry, diversified by fishing, along that same sandy barrier. He stayed later than he expected; and, boating over to the main in the nightfall, he came walking along the uneven and indented shore, on his way to Fairleigh Park, while Adela was still abroad.