"Nonsense; you are dreaming, girl—gold can gild every stain."
"I have been dreaming," said Mary, rising up in the bed, and putting back the long hair which had escaped from under her cap, and now fell in rich neglected masses round her pallid face. "Yes. I have been dreaming—such an awful dream! I see it before me yet."
"What was it, Mary?" asked her brother, with quivering lips.
"It was a lonesome place," continued the girl, "a dark lonesome place; but God's moon was shining there, and there was no need of the sun, or of any other light, for all seemed plain to me as the noon day.
"I saw an old man with grey hairs, and another man old and grey was beside him. The countenances of both were dark and unlovely. And one old man was on his knees—but it was not to God he knelt; he had set up an idol to worship, and that idol was gold; and God, as a punishment, had turned his heart to stone, so that nothing but the gold could awaken the least sympathy there. And whilst he knelt to the idol, I heard a cry—a loud, horrid, despairing cry—and the old man fell to the earth weltering in his blood; but he had still strength to lock up his idol, and he held the key as tightly as if it had been the key of heaven. And I saw two young men enter the house and attack the old man, while his companion, whom they did not see, stole out of a back door and fled. And they dashed the wounded old man against the stones, and they marred his visage with savage blows; and they trod him underfoot, and tore from him his idol, and fled.
"And I saw another youth with a face full of sorrow, and while he wept over the dead man, he was surrounded by strange figures, who, regardless of his grief, forced him from the room. And while I pondered over these things in my heart, an angel came to my bed-side, and whispered a message from God in my ears. And I awoke from my sleep; and lo, the old man's idol was before me, and his blood was upon your hands, Godfrey Hurdlestone."
"Is this a dream?" cried Godfrey, glancing instinctively at his hands, on whose white well-formed fingers no trace of the recently enacted tragedy remained, "did you really witness the scene you have just described; tell me the truth. Mary, or by ——"
"Could these feeble limbs carry me to Ashton," said the girl, interrupting the dreadful oath ere it found utterance, "or could this rocking brain steady them, were I, indeed, able to rise from my bed—"
"Mathews," cried Godfrey, "what do you think of this?"
"That we should be off, or put such dreamers to silence."