And then, as there came no answer from that shrinking clinging figure, with a sudden spring forward, that brought him quite close to her, John Saltram tore the veil away from the hidden face.
"This must be some impostor," he said; "this is not my wife."
He was right. The creature clinging to Percival Nowell's arm was a pretty woman enough, with rather red hair, and a common face. She was about Marian's height; and that was the only likeness between them.
The spectators of this brief fracas crowded round the actors in it, seeing nothing but the insult offered to a lady, and highly indignant with John Saltram; and amidst their murmurs Percival Nowell pushed his way to the shore, with the woman still clinging to his arm.
CHAPTER XLII
THE PLEASURES OF WYNCOMB
That shrill anguish-stricken cry which Ellen Whitelaw had heard on the night of the stranger's visit to Wyncomb Farm haunted her afterwards with a wearisome persistence. She could not forget that wild unearthly sound; she could not help continually trying to find some solution for the mystery, until her brain was tired with the perpetual effort.
Ponder upon this matter as she might, she could find no reasonable explanation of the enigma; and in spite of her common sense—a quality of which she possessed a very fair share—she was fain to believe at last that this grim bare-looking old house was haunted, and that the agonised shriek she and Mrs. Tadman had heard that night was only the ghostly sound of some cry wrung from a bleeding heart in days gone by, the echo of an anguish that had been in the far past.