More than two hours had passed since she had left him, and Catherine was lying awake, watching the moonlight glimmering on the moor. Her heart was tranquil in her, her thoughts free from all unrest as she lay in the oak bed, happily lethargic, waiting for her husband’s step upon the stairs. The day had been very sweet to her, and there was no shadow across the moon. She lay thinking of her children, and her childhood, and of the near past, when she had first sung the songs that she had sung to the man that night.
The crash of broken glass and the sound of some heavy body falling startled Catherine from her land of dreams. She sat up, listening, like one roused from a first sleep. Murchison must have turned out the lamp and then blundered against some piece of furniture in the dark. If it were her treasured and much-sought china! She slipped out of bed, opened the door, and went out on to the landing.
“James, what is it?”
The narrow hall lay dark below her, and she won no answer from her husband.
“Are you hurt, dear?”
Still no reply; the door was shut.
“James, what has happened?”
She crept down the stairs, and stepped on the last step. A curious, “gaggling” laugh came from the room across the hall. At the sound she stiffened, one hand holding the bosom of her laced night-gear, the other gripping the oak rail. A sudden blind dread smote her till she seemed conscious of nothing save the dark.
“James, are you coming?”
Again she heard that mockery of a laugh, and a kind of senseless jabbering like the babbling of a drunken man. A rush of anguish caught her heart, the anguish of one who feels the horror of the stifling sea. She tottered, groped her way back into her room, and sank down on the bed in an agony of defeat. Was it for this that her love had spent itself in all the tender planning of this little place? How had it happened? Not with deceit! Even in her blindness she prayed to God that he had not wounded her with willing hand.