I bade her good-night and walked towards home.

XI

She was right:  those few minutes of concentrated agony had in truth made me ill.  My wet clothes clinging round my body began to chill me now, and as I crept into the house and upstairs to my room, my teeth were chattering like castanets.

As I threw off my wet clothes and turned into bed, I was partially forewarned by the throbbing at my temples, the rolling fire at the back of my eyeballs, the thirst in my parched throat, that some kind of illness, some kind of fever, was upon me.  And no wonder, after such a night!

In that awful trance, when I had sat with my face buried on Winifred’s breast, not only had the physiognomy of the cove, but every circumstance of our lives together, been photographed in my brain in one picture of fire.  When, after the concentrated agony of those first moments of tension, I looked up into Winifred’s face, as though awakening from a dream, my flesh had ‘appeared,’ she told me, ‘grey and wizened, like the flesh of an old man.’  The mental and physical effects of this were now gathering around me and upon me.

From a painful slumber I awoke in about an hour with red-heat at my brain and with a sickening dread at my heart.  ‘It is fever,’ thought I; ’I am going to be ill; and what is there to do in the morning at the ebb of the tide before Winifred can go upon the sands?  I ought not to have come home at all,’ I said.  ’Suppose illness were to seize me and prevent my getting there?’ The dreadful thought alone paralysed me quite.  Under it I lay as under a nightmare.  I scarcely dared try to get out of bed, lest I should find my fears well-grounded.  At last, cautiously and timorously, I put one leg out of bed and then the other, till at length I felt the little ridges of the carpet; but my knees gave way, my head swam, my stomach heaved with a deadly nausea, and I fell like a log on the floor.

As I lay there I knew that I was indeed in the grasp of fever.  I nearly went crazed from terror at the thought that in a few minutes I should perhaps lapse into unconsciousness and be unable to rise—­unable to reach the sands in the morning and seek for Wynne’s body—­unable even to send some one there as a substitute to perform that task.  But then whom was I to send? whom could I entrust with such a commission?  I was under a pledge to my dead father never to divulge the secret of the amulet save to my mother and uncle.  And besides, if I would effectually save Winifred from the harm I dreaded, the hideous sacrilege committed by her father must be kept a secret from servants and townspeople.  Whom then could I send on this errand?  At the present moment, there were but four people in the world who knew that the cross and casket had been placed in the coffin—­my mother, my uncle, myself, and now, alas!  Winifred.  My mother was the one person who could do what I wanted done.  Her sagacity I knew; her courage I knew.  But how could I—­how dare I, broach such a matter to her?  I felt it would be sheer madness to do so, and yet, in my dire strait, in my terror at the illness I was fighting with, I did it, as I am going to tell.