She saw the brawny outline of the woman faintly like a black shadow as she made her way through the door into the kitchen, and she heard the door close, and the table shoved cautiously back into its place, and then, with a beating heart, she lay still and awfully wide awake in the dark.
CHAPTER XXVII.
THROUGH THE HOUSE.
This stalwart lady stumbled and groped her way back to her chair, and sat down again in the kitchen. The chair in which she sat was an old-fashioned arm-chair of plain wood, uncoloured and clumsy.
When Mildred Tarnley returned, the changed appearance of her guest struck her.
“Be ye sick, ma’am?” she asked, standing, candle in hand, by the chair.
The visitor was sitting bolt upright, with a large hand clutched on each arm of the chair, with a face deadly pale and distorted by a frown or a spasm that frightened old Mildred, who fancied, as she made no sign, not the slightest stir, that she was in a fit, or possibly dead.
“For God’s sake, ma’am,” conjured old Mildred, fiercely, “will ye speak?”
The lady in the chair started, shrugged, and gasped. It was like shaking off a fit.
“Ho! oh, Mildred Tarnley, I was thinking—I was thinking—did you speak?”
Mildred looked at her, not knowing what to make of it. Too much laudanum—was it? or that nervous pain in her head.