Dorian stood like one stunned a moment, then followed in swift pursuit. But he was suddenly arrested by an outstretched arm.
"Where are you flying to, Dorian?" demanded Captain Van Hise, who had just come out to look for his friend.
"Do not detain me, Van Hise. I am following Nita, who has just fled from me in some strange alarm. She went out at the garden-gate. Come! let us pursue her, for I fear her terrors will lead her into something dreadful," faltered Dorian, dragging his friend with him in pursuit of the flying girl.
But the slight delay had given her the advantage of them. She flew like the wind along the sands, flying from the degradation that she could not face, flying to seek refuge in the deep, dark sea from her wretched life and its crowding ills.
They could never have overtaken her, she had gained too much the start of them, and terror lent wings to her feet, but—suddenly she stumbled and fell prostrate over an inert body lying directly in her path.
In her frenzied flight she had not perceived it, but now—now, as she struggled to rise again, a startled cry shrilled over her lips.
She comprehended the ghastly truth—here, almost at the gates of Gray Gables, murder had been done! Recoiling with a strangled cry, she looked down at the body at her feet—the ugly, twisted body, the hideous face, the evil eyes set in a ghastly stare of death. On the instant she recognized him—Miser Farnham!
He was dead—murdered almost at the gates of Gray Gables, while on his way to claim his bride, to score his horrid triumph and break two loving hearts. It was a dastardly deed, and fate or retribution had met him on his way.
But who had done that awful deed? Some enemy, of course—perhaps the wicked old fortune-teller. But, though she trembled and shuddered, it came to her with a thrill of joy that now she was free—now Dorian need never know the secret of which she was so bitterly ashamed—that she had been for one cruel year a wife in name to the wicked miser.
She would fly back to the house—she would steal up to her own room and remove the white dress with its blood-stains where she had slipped and fallen on the body. No one should know that she had found the murdered man there.