-do I look ill? Oh, Rhoda, Rhoda, may you never feel this!"

He turned away from her without awaiting her answer, and walked away
with the appearance of intense agitation, as if to leave her. He turned
again, however, and with a face pallid and sunken as death, approached
her slowly--

"Rhoda," said he, "don't tell what I have said to anyone--don't, I
conjure you, even to Charles. I speak too much at random, and say more
than I mean--a foolish, rambling habit: so do not repeat one word of it,
not one word to any living mortal. You and I, Rhoda, must have our
little secrets."

He ended with an attempt at a smile, so obviously painful and
fear-stricken that as he walked hurriedly away, the astounded girl burst
into a bitter flood of tears. What was, what could be, the meaning of
the shocking scene she had then been forced to witness? She dared not
answer the question. Yet one ghastly doubt haunted her like her
shadow--a suspicion that the malignant and hideous light of madness was
already glaring upon his mind. As, leaning upon the arm of her
astonished attendant, she retracted her steps, the trees, the flowers,
the familiar hall-door, the echoing passages--every object that met her
eye--seemed strange and unsubstantial, and she gliding on among them in
a horrid dream.

Time passed on: there was no renewal of the painful scene which dwelt so
sensibly in the affrighted imagination of Rhoda. Marston's manner was
changed towards her; he seemed shy, cowed, and uneasy in her presence,
and thenceforth she saw less than ever of him. Meanwhile the time
approached which was to witness the long expected, and, by Rhoda, the
intensely prayed for arrival of her brother.

Some four or five days before this event, Mr. Marston, having, as he
said, some business in Chester, and further designing to meet his son
there, took his departure from Gray Forest, leaving poor Rhoda to the
guardianship of her guilty stepmother; and although she had seen so
little of her father, yet the very consciousness of his presence had
given her a certain confidence and sense of security, which vanished at
the moment of his departure. Fear-stricken and wretched as he had been,
his removal, nevertheless, seemed to her to render the lonely and
inauspicious mansion still more desolate and ominous than before.

She had, with a vague and instinctive antipathy, avoided all contact and
intercourse with Mrs. Marston, or as, for distinctness sake, we shall
conti