“Don’t touch me,” she said, wildly, “you don’t know how wicked I am. It is true—I feel it is true. Oh, Eugenia! God forgive me. I think my punishment is greater than I can bear,” and before her lover could stop her she had rushed into the house.
For a moment Gerald gazed after her in distress and bewilderment, half doubting if he had heard aright.
“She does not know what she is saying,” he decided. “My poor Roma, the shock has been too much for her; but I cannot stay,” and at a rapid pace he set off across the park in the direction of the scene of the frightful disaster.
Upstairs, meanwhile, Roma, locked into her own room, “matter-of-fact, easy-going” Roma—Roma, “into whose composition entered no tragic elements,” Gerald Thurston’s light-hearted betrothed of one short hour ago, was passing through an agony of remorse, a very fiery furnace of misery, such as falls to the lot of few women of her healthy, happy nature.
Volume Three—Chapter Ten.
From the Gates of the Grave.
“The best is yet to be,
The last of life, for which the first was made:
Our times are in His hand,
Who saith ‘A whole I planed,
Youth shows but half: see all, nor be afraid!’”
Rabbi Ben Ezra.
She was not dead. “Still alive, but perfectly unconscious,” was the report that met Gerald as he reached the lodge. “They have not told Captain Chancellor how bad it is,” added Mr Thurston’s informant, “for he was severely stunned himself, and the hearing it might do him harm. He thinks Mrs Chancellor escaped unhurt.”