Bonnibel sprang to her feet, trembling all over.
"Let us go this moment," she said, feverishly; "oh, what if we should be too late!"
Wild with horror she set about her preparations. Her one thought now was to save Leslie Dane though the whole world should know the shameful secret she tried so hard to keep from its knowledge.
[CHAPTER XXXVII.]
February winds blew coldly over the sea at Cape May, the day was bleak and sunless, a misty, drizzling rain fell slowly but continuously, chilling the very marrow of one's bones. No one who could have helped it would have cared to venture out in such dreary, uncomfortable, depressing weather. But up and down the beach, before the closed mansion of Sea View, walked a weird, strange figure, bareheaded in the pitiless war of the elements, bowed and bent by age, clothed in rent and tattered finery, with scant, gray locks flying elfishly in the breeze that blew strongly and cruelly enough to have lifted the little, witch-like form and cast it into the sea.
"I am a fool to come out in such stormy weather!" this odd creature muttered to herself. "What is it that drives me out of my sick bed to wander here in the rain and wind before Francis Arnold's house? There is a thing they call Remorse, ha, ha—is that the haunting devil that pursues me?"
She looked at the lonely mansion, and turned back to the sea with a shudder.
"Whose is the sin?" she said, looking weirdly out at the wild waves as if they had a human voice to answer her query. "She tempted me with her gold—she had murder in her heart as red as if she had dyed her hands in his life-blood! Ugh!" she wrung her hands and shook them from her as if throwing off invisible drops, "how thick and hot it was when it spurted out over my hands! Yet was not the sin hers? Hers was the brain that planned, mine but the hand that struck the blow!"