Dorcas had read and heard stories of men seemingly no worse than their neighbours—nay, highly esteemed, and praised, and liked—who yet were haunted by evil men, who encountered them in lonely places, or by night, and controlled them by the knowledge of some dreadful crime. Was Stanley—her husband—whose character she had begun to discern, whose habitual mystery was, somehow, tinged in her mind with a shade of horror, one of this two-faced, diabolical order of heroes?
Why should he dread this cabal, as he called it, even though directed by the malignant energy of the absent and shadowy Mark Wylder? What could all the world do to harm him in free England, if he were innocent, if he were what he seemed—no worse than his social peers?
Why should it be necessary to buy off the conspirators whom a guiltless man would defy and punish?
The doubt did not come in these defined shapes. As a halo surrounds a saint, a shadow rose suddenly, and enveloped pale, scented, smiling Stanley, with the yellow eyes. He stood in the centre of a dreadful medium, through which she saw him, ambiguous and awful; and she sickened.
'Are you ill, Dorkie, darling?' said the apparition in accents of tenderness. 'Yes, you are ill.'
And he hastily threw open the window, close to which they were sitting, and she quickly revived in the cooling air.
She saw his yellow eyes fixed upon her features, and his face wearing an odd expression—was it interest, or tenderness, or only scrutiny; to her there seemed a light of insincerity and cruelty in its pallor.
'You are better, darling; thank Heaven, you are better.'
'Yes—yes—a great deal better; it is passing away.'
Her colour was returning, and with a shivering sigh, she said—