e."

Her voice was very distinct, but also very faint, with something
undulatory in it, that seemed to enter Gertrude's head rather than her
ear.

Saying this she smiled horribly, and, lifting her handkerchief,
disclosed for a moment a great wound in her breast, deep in which
Gertrude saw darkly the head of a snake writhing.

Hereupon she uttered a wild scream of terror, and, diving under the
bed-clothes, remained more dead than alive there, until her maid,
alarmed by her cry, came in, and having searched the room, and shut the
window at her desire, did all in her power to comfort her.

If this was a nightmare and embodied only by a form of expression which
in some states belongs to the imagination, a leading idea in the
controversy in which her mind had long been employed, it had at least
the effect of deciding her against leaving Faxwell. And so that point
was settled; and unpleasant relations continued between the tenants of
the farm and the master of Mardykes Hall.

To Lady Mardykes all this was very painful, although Sir Bale did not
insist upon making a separation between his wife and her cousin. But to
Mardykes Hall that cousin came no more. Even Lady Mardykes thought it
better to see her at Faxwell than to risk a meeting in the temper in
which Sir Bale then was. And thus several years passed.

No tidings of Philip Feltram were heard; and, in fact, none ever reached
that part of the world; and if it had not been highly improbable that he
could have drowned himself in the lake without his body sooner or later
having risen to the surface, it would have been concluded that he had
either accidentally or by design made away with himself in its waters.

Over Mardykes Hall there was a gloom--no sound of children's voices was
heard there, and even the hope of that merry advent had died out.

This disappointment had no doubt helped to fix in Sir Bale's mind the
idea of the insecurity of his property, and the morbid fancy that
William Feltram and old Trebeck were conspiring to seize it; than which,
I need hardly say, no imagination more insane could have fixed itself in
his mind.

In other things, however, Sir Bale was shrewd and sharp, a clear and
rapid man of business, and although this was a strange whim, it was not
so unnatural in a man who was by nature so prone to suspicion as Sir
Bale Mardykes.

During the years, now seven, that had elapsed since the marriage of Sir
Bale and Miss Janet Feltram, there had