he peace by noon. With this resolution he
went to bed early.

She was glad to be alone, at all events.

Now, mind you, there were plenty of vain and vulgar, yet respectable
girls, in Cumberland, who would have been delighted to be fought about,
even though bloodshed were to be the result. But this young lady was not
vain, but proud. She was sensitive, too, and troubled with a conscience.
It reproached her bitterly: it told her she had permitted the addresses
of two gentlemen, and so mischief had somehow arisen--out of her levity.
Now her life had been uneventful and innocent: this was the very first
time she had been connected with anything like a crime, and her remorse
was great; so was her grief; but her fears were greater still. The
terrible look Griffith had cast at his rival flashed on her; so did his
sinister words. She felt, that, if he and Neville met, nothing less than
Neville's death or his own would separate them. Suppose that even now
one of them lay a corpse, cold and ghastly as the snow that now covered
Nature's face!

The agitation of her mind was such that her body could not be still. Now
she walked the room in violent distress, wringing her hands; now she
kneeled and prayed fervently for both those lives she had endangered;
often she flew to the window and looked eagerly out, writhing and
rebelling against the network of female custom that entangled her and
would not let her fly out of her cage even to do a good action,--to
avert a catastrophe by her prayers, or her tears, or her good sense.

And all ended in her realizing that she was a woman, a poor, impotent
being, born to lie quiet and let things go: at that she wept helplessly.

So wore away the first night of agony this young creature ever knew.

Towards morning, exhausted by her inward struggles, she fell asleep upon
a sofa.

But her trouble followed her. She dreamed she was on a horse, hurried
along with prodigious rapidity, in a darkened atmosphere, a sort of dry
fog: she knew somehow she was being taken to see some awful, mysterious
thing. By-and-by the haze cleared and she came out upon pleasant, open,
sunny fields, that almost dazzled her. She passed gates, and hedges too,
all clear, distinct, and individual. Presently a voice by her side said,
"This way!" and her horse seemed to turn of his own accord through a
gap, and in one moment she came on a group of gentlemen. It was Griffith
Gaunt, and two strangers. Then she spoke, and said,