ngth of her frenzy, to the farther side of the bed, and writhing out
on the opposite side, crept under it and lay still. In a torture of
bewilderment and remorse Arthur buried his face in the bedside. Then,
helpless to distinguish what he had done from what he had dreamed, he
sprang back to the place where Isabel had lain sleeping, and lo, it was
empty.

"Oh, was it thou, was it thou?" he wailed, in a stifled voice. "Was it
not he?"

Whispering and moaning her name, hearkening and groping, he sought her
from corner to corner, first of her room and then of his own, and then
went to the hall and to other rooms in the same harrowing quest.

Isabel crept forth and darted to her babe. Yet as she leaned to take it
in her arms her better judgment told her the child was safe. The husband
too, and every one beside, were safer from his jealous wrath while the
babe remained. With one anguished knitting of her hands over it she left
it, and fled in her night-dress. Arthur's course was made plain by his
moanings, and easily avoiding him, she glided down a back stair, out
into the arbor, and across to her mother's cottage and bed-chamber. As
she did so he returned hurriedly to his room, with low cries of less
wretched conviction, and looked eagerly under his bed and then under
hers. Thereupon the last hope died, and he dropped to his face on the
floor in abject agony.

XVIII

MISSING

After a time a new conjecture brought him to his feet. To solve it he
would go to the pond. If he had truly been there and done this appalling
thing, he would know it by the empty imprint of the boulder he had taken
from its resting place of years. If he had not, then Isabel had fled to
her mother and would be found with her in the morning, and the blot of
her murder, though it blackened his soul, was yet not on his hands.

He went to the water, and soon he came again with the step and face of
one called out of his grave. Slowly he counted the disordered coverings
of his wife's couch, stood a moment in desolate perplexity, and then
went quickly and counted those of his own. A sheet and a blanket were
gone. He turned to a closet and supplied the lack, and then paced the
floor until dawn.

Before the servants were fairly astir he laid away the clothing Isabel
had put off, and contrived to leave the house and pass through the arbor
unseen until he reached its farther end; but there Mrs. Morris, in a
dressing gown, opened to him before he