And then the tomb is opened, and the white angels enter the tomb.  And the coffin is opened, and the girl trembles lest the angels should discover the stain she knew of.  But lo! to her great joy they do not see it, and they bear her away through the blue night, past the sacred stars, even within the glory of Paradise.  And it is not until one whose face she cannot recognize, and whose presence among the angels of Heaven she cannot comprehend, steals away one of the garlands of white with which she was entwined, that the fatal stain becomes visible.  The angels are overcome with a mighty sorrow, and relinquishing their burden, they break into song, and the song they sing is one of grief; and above an accompaniment of spheral music it travels through the spaces of Heaven; and she listens to its wailing echoes as she falls, falls,—­falls past the sacred stars to the darkness of terrestrial skies,—­falls towards the sea where the dark angels are waiting for her; and as she falls she leans with reverted neck and strives to see their faces, and as she nears them she distinguishes one into whose arms she is going; it is, it is—­the...

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“Save me, save me!” she cried; and bewildered and dazed with the dream, she stared on the room, now chill with summer dawn; the pale light broke over the Shoreham sea, over the lordly downs and rich plantations of Leywood.  Again she murmured, it was only a dream, it was only a dream; again a sort of presentiment of happiness spread like light through her mind, and again remembrance came with its cruel truths—­there was something that was not a dream, but that was worse than the dream.  And then with despair in her heart she sat watching the cold sky turn to blue, the delicate bright blue of morning, and the garden grow into yellow and purple and red.  There lay the sea, joyous and sparkling in the light of the mounting sun, and the masts of the vessels at anchor in the long water way.  The tapering masts were faint on the shiny sky, and now between them and about them a face seemed to be.  Sometimes it was fixed on one, sometimes it flashed like a will o’ the wisp, and appeared a little to the right or left of where she had last seen it.  It was the face that was now buried in her very soul, and sometimes it passed out of the sky into the morning mist, which still heaved about the edges of the woods; and there she saw something grovelling, crouching, crawling,—­a wild beast, or was it a man?

She did not weep, nor did she moan.  She sat thinking.  She dwelt on the remembrance of the hills and the tramp with strange persistency, and yet no more now than before did she attempt to come to conclusions with her thought; it was vague, she would not define it; she brooded over it sullenly and obtusely.  Sometimes her thoughts slipped away from it, but with each returning, a fresh stage was marked in the progress of her nervous despair.

So the hours went by.  At eight o’clock the maid knocked at the door.  Kitty opened it mechanically, and she fell into the woman’s arms, weeping and sobbing passionately.  The sight of the female face brought infinite relief; it interrupted the jarred and strained sense of the horrible; the secret affinities of sex quickened within her.  The woman’s presence filled Kitty with the feelings that the harmlessness of a lamb or a soft bird inspires.