“Is he nothing to you? Don’t you know him?”
“He is nothing to me—less than nothing. As to knowing him—I saw him yesterday, when they put him into the pond. A man like that! I should shudder to meet him!”
“Ay, indeed!” said Barbara, reassured. “You will understand, Madame Vine, that this history has been given to you in confidence. I look upon you as one of ourselves.”
There was no answer. Madame Vine sat on, with her white face. She and it wore altogether a ghastly look.
“It tells like a fable out of a romance,” resumed Mrs. Carlyle. “Well for him if the romance be not ended in the gibbet. Fancy what it would be for him—Sir Francis Levison—to be hung for murder!”
“Barbara, my dearest!”
The voice was Mr. Carlyle’s, and she flew off on the wings of love. It appeared that the gentlemen had not yet departed, and now thought they would take coffee first.
She flew off to her idolized husband, leaving her who had once been idolized to her loneliness. She sank down on the sofa; she threw her arms up in her heart-sickness; she thought she would faint; she prayed to die. It was horrible, as Barbara had called it. For that man with the red stain upon his hand and soul she had flung away Archibald Carlyle.
If ever retribution came home to woman, it came home in that hour to Lady Isabel.