"You shall never live to do this," she said. "I will kill you first. Why have you tormented me so? Why could you not let me alone? What harm had I ever done you that you should make yourself my persecutor, and dog my steps, and watch my looks, and play the spy upon me? Do you want to drive me mad? Do you know what it is to wrestle with a mad-woman? No," cried my lady, with a laugh, "you do not, or you would never--"
She stopped abruptly and drew herself suddenly to her fullest hight. It was the same action which Robert had seen in the old half-drunken lieutenant; and it had that same dignity--the sublimity of extreme misery.
"Go away, Mr. Audley," she said. "You are mad, I tell you, you are mad."
"I am going, my lady," answered Robert, quietly. "I would have condoned your crimes out of pity to your wretcheness. You have refused to accept my mercy. I wished to have pity upon the living. I shall henceforth only remember my duty to the dead."
He walked away from the lonely well under the shadow of the limes. My lady followed him slowly down that long, gloomy avenue, and across the rustic bridge to the iron gate. As he passed through the gate, Alicia came out of a little half-glass door that opened from an oak-paneled breakfast-room at one angle of the house, and met her cousin upon the threshold of the gateway.
"I have been looking for you everywhere, Robert," she said. "Papa has come down to the library, and will be glad to see you."
The young man started at the sound of his cousin's fresh young voice. "Good Heaven!" he thought, "can these two women be of the same clay? Can this frank, generous-hearted girl, who cannot conceal any impulse of her innocent nature, be of the same flesh and blood as that wretched creature whose shadow falls upon the path beside me!"
He looked from his cousin to Lady Audley, who stood near the gateway, waiting for him to stand aside and let her pass him.
"I don't know what has come to your cousin, my dear Alicia," said my lady. "He is so absent-minded and eccentric as to be quite beyond my comprehension."
"Indeed," exclaimed Miss Audley; "and yet I should imagine, from the length of your tete-a-tete, that you had made some effort to understand him."
"Oh, yes," said Robert, quietly, "my lady and I understand each other very well; but as it is growing late I will wish you good-evening, ladies. I shall sleep to-night at Mount Stanning, as I have some business to attend to up there, and I will come down and see my uncle to-morrow."