At length, Dr. Douglass advised their return home.  And therefore they set out, and upon the last of March, approached Dell-Delight.

The sky was overcast, the ground was covered with snow, the weather was damp, and very cold for the last of March.  As evening drew on, and the leaden sky lowered, and the chill damp penetrated the comfortable carriage in which they traveled, Mr. Willcoxen redoubled his attentions to Miriam, carefully wrapping her cloak and furs about her, and letting down the leathern blinds and the damask hangings, to exclude the cold; but Miriam shrank from his touch, and shivered more than before, and drew closely into her own corner.

“Poor child, the cold nips and shrivels her as it does a tropical flower,” said Thurston, desisting from his efforts after he had tucked a woolen shawl around her feet.

“It is really very unseasonable weather—­there is snow in the atmosphere.  I don’t wonder it pinches Miriam,” said Paul Douglass.

Ah! they did not either of them know that it was a spiritual fever and ague alternately burning and freezing her very heart’s blood—­hope and fear, love and loathing, pity and horror, that striving together made a pandemonium of her young bosom.  Like a flight of fiery arrows came the coincidences of the tale she had heard, and the facts she knew.  That spring, eight years before, Mr. Murray said he had, unseen, witnessed the marriage of Thurston Willcoxen and Marian.  That spring, eight years before, she knew Mr. Willcoxen and Miss Mayfield had been together on a visit to the capital.  Thurston had gone to Europe, Marian had returned home, but had never seemed the same since her visit to the city.  The very evening of the house-warming at Luckenough, where Marian had betrayed so much emotion, Thurston had suddenly returned, and presented himself at that mansion.  Yet in all the months that followed she had never seen Thurston and Marian together, Thurston was paying marked and constant attention to Miss Le Roy, while Marian’s heart was consuming with a secret sorrow and anxiety that she refused to communicate even to Edith.  How distinctly came back to her mind those nights when, lying by Marian’s side, she had put her hand over upon her face and felt the tears on her cheeks.  Those tears!  The recollection of them now, and in this connection, filled her heart with indescribable emotion.  Her mother, too, had died in the belief that Marian had fallen by the hands of her lover or her husband.  Lastly, upon the same night of Marian’s murder, Thurston Willcoxen had been unaccountably absent, during the whole night, from the deathbed of his grandfather.  And then his incurable melancholy from that day to this—­his melancholy augmented to anguish at the annual return of this season.

And then rising, in refutation of all this evidence, was his own irreproachable life and elevated character.

Ah! but she had, young, as she was, heard of such cases before—­how in some insanity of selfishness or frenzy of passion, a crime had been perpetrated by one previously and afterward irreproachable in conduct.  Piercing wound after wound smote these thoughts like swift coming arrows.