He paused for a moment. His voice had grown thick and husky; but he broke out violently in the next instant.
"Great Heaven! why do I stop talking like this? Listen to me, Margaret; if you want to see the last of me, you must find your way, somehow or other, to Woodbine Cottage, near Lisford—on the Lisford Road, I think. Find your way there—I'm going there now, and shall be there long before you—you understand?"
"Yes; Woodbine Cottage, Lisford—I shan't forget! God speed you, father!—God help you!"
"He is the God of sinners," thought the wretched girl. "He gave Cain a long lifetime in which to repent of his sins."
Margaret thought this as she stood at the gate, listening to the horse's hoofs upon the gravel road that wound through the grounds away into the park.
She was very, very tired, but had little sense of her fatigue, and her journey was by no means finished yet. She did not once look back at Maudesley Abbey—that stately and splendid mansion, in which a miserable wretch had acted his part, and endured the penalty of his guilt, for many wearisome months She went away—hurrying along the lonely pathways, with the night breezes blowing her loose hair across her eyes, and half-blinding her as she went—to find the gate by which she had entered the park.
She went out at this gateway because it was the only point of egress by which she could leave the park without being seen by the keeper of a lodge. The dim morning light was grey in the sky before she met any one whom she could ask to direct her to Woodbine Cottage; but at last a man came out of a farmyard with a couple of milk-pails, and directed her to the Lisford Road.
It was broad daylight when she reached the little garden-gate before Major Vernon's abode. It was broad daylight, and the door leading into the prim little hall was ajar. The girl pushed it open, and fell into the arms of a man, who caught her as she fainted.
"Poor girl, poor child!" said Joseph Wilmot; "to think what she has suffered. And I thought that she would profit by that crime; I thought that she would take the money, and be content to leave the mystery unravelled. My poor child! my poor, unhappy child!"
The man who had murdered Henry Dunbar wept aloud over the white face of his unconscious daughter.