road came down to the shore. Pushing the boat up on the beach, she
sprang out; and, telling Raby to wait there till she returned, she
walked rapidly up the road. A guide-post said, "Six miles to Springton."
Hetty stood some time looking reflectingly at this sign: then she walked
on for half a mile, till she came to another road running north; here
a guide-post said, "Fairfield, five miles." This was what Hetty was in
search of. As she read the sign, she said in a low tone: "Five miles;
that is easily walked." Then she turned and hastened back to the
shore, stopping on the way to gather for Raby a big bunch of the snowy
Indian-pipes, which grew in shining clumps in the moist dark hemlock
woods. A strange and terrible idea was slowly taking possession of
Hetty. Day and night it haunted her. Once having been entertained as
possible, it could never be banished from her mind. How such an impulse
could have become deep-seated in a nature like Hetty's will for ever
remain a mystery. One would have said that she was the last woman in
the world to commit a morbid or ill-regulated act. But the act she was
meditating now was one which seemed like the act of insanity. Yet had
Hetty never in her life seemed farther removed from any such tendency.
She was calm, cheerful, self-contained. If any one saw any change in
her, it seemed like nothing more than the natural increase of quiet and
decorum coming with her increased age. Even her husband, when he looked
back on these months, trying in anguish to remember every day, every
hour, could recall no word or deed or look of hers which had seemed to
him unnatural. And yet there was not a day, hardly an hour, in which her
mind was not occupied with the details of a plan for going away secretly
from her house, under such circumstances as to make it appear that she
had been drowned in the lake. That she must leave her husband free to
marry Rachel Barlow had become a fixed idea in Hetty's mind. She was too
conscientious to kill herself for this purpose: moreover, she did not in
the least wish to die. She was very unhappy in this keen conviction that
she no longer sufficed for her husband's happiness; that she was, as she
would have phrased it, "in the way." But she was not heart-broken over
it, as a sentimental and feeble woman would have been. "There is plenty
to do in the world," she said to herself. "I've got a good many years'
work left in me yet: the thing is how to get at it." For many wee