He opened the doors, entered a step or two, and came back almost instantly with a rigid face.  “My good God, the gentleman in bed is dead!  I think he has been hurt with a knife—­a lot of blood had run down upon the floor!”

The alarm was soon given, and the house which had lately been so quiet resounded with the tramp of many footsteps, a surgeon among the rest.  The wound was small, but the point of the blade had touched the heart of the victim, who lay on his back, pale, fixed, dead, as if he had scarcely moved after the infliction of the blow.  In a quarter of an hour the news that a gentleman who was a temporary visitor to the town had been stabbed in his bed, spread through every street and villa of the popular watering-place.

LVII

Meanwhile Angel Clare had walked automatically along the way by which he had come, and, entering his hotel, sat down over the breakfast, staring at nothingness.  He went on eating and drinking unconsciously till on a sudden he demanded his bill; having paid which, he took his dressing-bag in his hand, the only luggage he had brought with him, and went out.

At the moment of his departure a telegram was handed to him—­a few words from his mother, stating that they were glad to know his address, and informing him that his brother Cuthbert had proposed to and been accepted by Mercy Chant.

Clare crumpled up the paper and followed the route to the station; reaching it, he found that there would be no train leaving for an hour and more.  He sat down to wait, and having waited a quarter of an hour felt that he could wait there no longer.  Broken in heart and numbed, he had nothing to hurry for; but he wished to get out of a town which had been the scene of such an experience, and turned to walk to the first station onward, and let the train pick him up there.

The highway that he followed was open, and at a little distance dipped into a valley, across which it could be seen running from edge to edge.  He had traversed the greater part of this depression, and was climbing the western acclivity when, pausing for breath, he unconsciously looked back.  Why he did so he could not say, but something seemed to impel him to the act.  The tape-like surface of the road diminished in his rear as far as he could see, and as he gazed a moving spot intruded on the white vacuity of its perspective.

It was a human figure running.  Clare waited, with a dim sense that somebody was trying to overtake him.

The form descending the incline was a woman’s, yet so entirely was his mind blinded to the idea of his wife’s following him that even when she came nearer he did not recognize her under the totally changed attire in which he now beheld her.  It was not till she was quite close that he could believe her to be Tess.

“I saw you—­turn away from the station—­just before I got there—­and I have been following you all this way!”