The vicarage had been a Babel since early morning, with all those noisy tongues. Yes, the tea had refreshed her, but her head still ached, and she thought it would be wiser to go to bed.
'Please do go, Aunt Milly,' Olive had chimed in, and when she had bidden them good-night, she heard Polly's flute-like voice bursting into Tra-la-la again as she closed the door; Qui va la she hummed to herself as she crept wearily along.
The storm had broken some miles below them, and only harmless summer lightning played on the ragged edges of the clouds as they gleamed fitfully, now here, now there; there were sudden glimpses of dark hills and a gray, still river, with some cattle grouped under the bridge, and then darkness.
'How strange to shiver in such heat,' thought Mildred, as she sat down by the open window. She scarcely knew why she sat there—'Only for a few minutes just to think it all out,' she said to herself, as she pressed her aching forehead between her hands; but hours passed and still she did not move.
Years afterwards Mildred was once asked which was the bitterest hour of her life, and she had grown suddenly pale and the answer had died away on her lips; the remembrance of this night had power to chill her even then.
A singular conflict was raging in Mildred's gentle bosom, passions hitherto unknown stirred and agitated it; the poor soul, dragged before the tribunal of inexorable womanhood, had pleaded guilty to a crime that was yet no crime—the sin of having loved unsought.
Unconsciousness could shield her no longer, the beneficent cloak of friendship could not cover her; mutual sympathy, the united strength of goodness and intellect, her own pitying woman's heart, had wrought the mischief under which she was now writhing with an intolerable sense of terror and shame.
And how intolerable can only be known by any pure-minded woman under the same circumstances! It would not be too much to say that Mildred absolutely cowered under it; tranquillity was broken up; the brain, calm and reasonable no longer, grew feverish with the effort to piece together tormenting fragments of recollection.
Had she betrayed herself? How had she sinned if she had so sinned? What had she done that the agony of this humiliation had come upon her—she who had thought of others, never of herself?
Was this the secret of her false peace? was her life indeed robbed of its sweetest illusion—she who had hoped for nothing, expected nothing? would she now go softly all her days as one who had lost her chief good?