"Anna, this--"
But she contrived to twist it from him and turned to the parlour. He drew her forcibly to him, speaking in a whisper.
"Are you going to visit upon me for ever the work of that miserable night?"
"Hush! they will hear you."
But there was no other answer. Her face grew white, her lips dry and trembling.
"Don't you know that you are my wife?"
"Oh, heaven, yes! I would rather have died. I would die now to undo that night's work."
She seemed bewildered, as if unconscious of her words; but there was always the struggle to get from him. Had he been an ogre who might eat her, she could not have evinced more terror. Sarah opened the kitchen door, and Anna took the opportunity to escape. Isaac looked after her. If ever misery, horror, despair, were depicted on a human countenance, they were on Anna's.
"I did not think she was one to take it up like this," he said, as he let himself out. And in the tone of his voice, despairing as her face, there was a perfectly hopeless sound, as if he felt that he could not combat fate.
By the next day the story of the ghost, singular to say, had spread all over Coastdown; singular, because the report did not come from Joe, or from any of Joe's hearers. It appeared that a young fellow of the name of Bartlet, a carpenter's apprentice, in passing the churchyard soon after poor Joe must have passed it, saw the same figure, which he protested--and went straight to the Mermaid and protested--was that of Mr. Hunter. He was a daring lad of sixteen, as hardy as Joe was timid. The company at the Mermaid accused him of having got frightened and fancied it; he answered that he feared "neither ghost nor devil," and persisted in his story with so much cool equanimity, that his adversaries were staggered.