The spinster was the first to recover from her trance of dismay, and, darting forward, she clutched Eva with an iron grasp.
“Lawk a-massy, here’s that crazy Eva got loose from the madhouse and come back! She has skeered pore ole gran’ther outen his senses, an’ she might ’a’ murdered him if we hadn’t come in the nick o’ time!”
“Lock her up until we can send her back to the asylum!” screamed Patty viciously, and between the three they dragged her across the hall and thrust her inside her own little room, while she sobbed to them:
“No matter what you do to me, cousins, please send and get the doctor to gran’ther! I’m afraid he’s dying!”
“If he’s dying, you’ve kilt him, coming back like this, you loonytic!” screeched the spinster, and Patty added gibingly:
“Back you go to Weston to-morrow, and till then you’ll be locked in your room with the ghosts of poor Terry and wicked Doctor Ludington, that fight their battle over in the same place every night.”
The door slammed, and she was locked alone in the darkness.
She groped her way with a dry, choking sob to the bed, guided by the gleams of moonlight shining through the uncurtained window, and buried her pale face in the pillows, as if to shut out the grim sight that Patty had taunted her with—the spectres of the untimely dead fighting over again their fatal combat of Hallowe’en.
It all rushed over her as freshly as yesterday, the horror, the despair, the banishment, and herself out in the night and the gloom alone—an outcast, despised thing, without a friend, mad with misery that drove reason from its throne.
But she had one comfort that even her bitterest enemies could not take away. Her grandfather believed in her, loved her, and had taken her home again.