She looked at her watch; it was not far from midnight. She moved from her support, and walked nervously up and down the room.
At last her mind was made up. She put on her hat and mantle, and left the house.
In her hand she clutched the piece of paper which George Craik had given her, and which contained the name and address of Mrs. Montmorency.
The place was close at hand, not far indeed from Bradley’s residence and her own. She hastened thither without hesitation, her way lay along the borders of the park, past the very Church which she had spared no expense to build, so that she came into its shadow almost before she knew.
It was a still and windless night; the skies were blue and clear, with scarcely a cloud, and the air was full of the vitreous pour of the summer moon, which glimmered on the church windows with ghostly silvern light. From the ground there exhaled a sickly heavy odour—the scent of the heated dew-charged earth.
Alma stood for some time looking at the building with the fortunes of which her own seemed so closely and mysteriously blent. Its shadow fell upon her with ominous darkness.
Black and sepulchral it seemed now, instead of bright and full of joy. As she gazed upon it, and remembered how she had laboured to upbuild it, how she had watched it grow stone by stone, and felt the joy a child might feel in marking the growth of some radiant flower, it seemed the very embodiment of her own despair.
Now, for the first time, her tears began to flow, but slowly, as if from sources in an arid heart. If she had heard the truth that day, the labour of her life was done; the place she looked upon was curst, and the sooner some thunderbolt of God struck it, or the hand of man razed it to the ground, the better for all the world.
There was a light in the house close by—in the room where she knew her lover was sitting. She crept close to the rails of the garden, and looked at the light through her tears. As she gazed, she prayed; prayed that God might spare her yet, rebuke the satanic calumny, and restore her lord and master to her, pure and perfect as he had been.
Then, in her pity for him and for herself, she thought how base he might think her if she sought from any lips but his own the confirmation of her horrible fear. She would be faithful till the last. Instead of seeking out the shameless woman, she would go in and ask Bradley himself to confess the truth.