of
her eyes. All her natural sentiments of affection and pity were driven
clean out of her by a sort of panic; she had just the same sense of
dismay and fearfulness that she would have had in the presence of an
apparition. She could nohow fancy this to be her chosen one--the man she
had loved; he was metamorphosed to a specimen of another species. 'I do
not loathe you,' she said with trembling. 'But I am so horrified--so
overcome! Let me recover myself. Will you sup now? And while you do so
may I go to my room to--regain my old feeling for you? I will try, if I
may leave you awhile? Yes, I will try!'

Without waiting for an answer from him, and keeping her gaze carefully
averted, the frightened woman crept to the door and out of the room. She
heard him sit down to the table, as if to begin supper though, Heaven
knows, his appetite was slight enough after a reception which had
confirmed his worst surmises. When Barbara had ascended the stairs and
arrived in her chamber she sank down, and buried her face in the coverlet
of the bed.

Thus she remained for some time. The bed-chamber was over the dining-
room, and presently as she knelt Barbara heard Willowes thrust back his
chair, and rise to go into the hall. In five minutes that figure would
probably come up the stairs and confront her again; it,--this new and
terrible form, that was not her husband's. In the loneliness of this
night, with neither maid nor friend beside her, she lost all
self-control, and at the first sound of his footstep on the stairs,
without so much as flinging a cloak round her, she flew from the room,
ran along the gallery to the back staircase, which she descended, and,
unlocking the back door, let herself out. She scarcely was aware what
she had done till she found herself in the greenhouse, crouching on a
flower-stand.

Here she remained, her great timid eyes strained through the glass upon
the garden without, and her skirts gathered up, in fear of the field-mice
which sometimes came there. Every moment she dreaded to hear footsteps
which she ought by law to have longed for, and a voice that should have
been as music to her soul. But Edmond Willowes came not that way. The
nights were getting short at this season, and soon the dawn appeared, and
the first rays of the sun. By daylight she had less fear than in the
dark. She thought she could meet him, and accustom herself to the
spectacle.

So the much-tried young woman un