‘If she doesn’t come to-night I give it up,’ he said to himself. ‘After all, there can be but little for me to gather from her rambling self-communion.’
He slept for an hour or two on the third afternoon, and thus on the third night of his watch was more wakeful than before. The nights were moon-light still, but the moon rose later, and had lost her full brightness.
He lay awake for three hours on this particular night, and heard not a sound, save the occasional scufflings, patterings, and squealings of mice behind the wainscot. But a few minutes after the eight-day clock in the hall had struck two, the watcher heard the sound that had startled him at his first coming—the slipshod footfall—the slow, ghost-like tread on the uncarpeted floor of the corridor.
Muriel was approaching.
She entered slowly—quietly—as before, and went straight to the window, which she opened noiselessly, taking infinite pains to avoid all sound. Then, kneeling on the window-seat, she put her head out of the window, and looked downward, as if she were watching some one below.
‘Be careful, love,’ she exclaimed, in a whisper just loud enough to reach Maurice’s attentive ear, ‘that root of ivy is loose. I’m afraid your foot will slip. Be careful!’
For some time she remained thus, holding imaginary communion with some one below. Then all at once she awoke to a sense of her solitude, and knew that she had been talking to a phantom. She drew back into the room, and began to walk up and down rapidly, with a distracted air, her hands clasped upon her head, as if by that pressure upon her temples she would have stilled the trouble within her brain.
‘They told me he was dead,’ she said to herself; ‘murdered, barbarously murdered. But there was no truth in it. They have told me other lies as well as that. They are all false, all cruel. My mother has made them so. She has taken away my husband. She has taken away my child. She has left me nothing but memory. Why did she not take that away? I should be happy—yes, quite happy, sitting by the fire and singing all day long, or roaming about among the hazel bushes, and the old apple-trees in the wilderness, if I did not remember. But I look down at my empty arms and remember that my blessed child ought to be lying in them, and then I hate her. Yes, I hate the mother that bore me.’
All this was said in disjointed gushes of quick, eager speech, divided by intervals of silence.
Suddenly she burst into a shrill laugh.