In their homely sitting-room, with old Dulcibella in friendly attendance, Mildred Tarnley found Alice. It is not always that a dreadful impression makes itself immediately manifest. Nature rallies all her forces at first to meet the danger. A certain excitement of resistance sustains the system through a crisis of horror, and often for a long time after; and it is not until this extraordinary muster of the vital forces begins to dissolve and subside that the shattered condition of the normal powers begins to declare itself.

The scene which had just occurred was a dreadful ordeal for Alice. To recount, and with effort and minuteness, to gather into order the terrific incidents of the night preceding, relate them bit by bit to the magistrate as he wrote them down, make oath to their truth as the basis of a public prosecution, and most dreadful—the having to see and identify the spectre who had murderously assailed her on the night before.

Every step affrighted her, the shadow of a moving branch upon the wall chilled her with terror; the voices of people who spoke seemed to pierce the naked nerve of her ear, and to sing through her head; even for a moment faces, kind and familiar, seemed to flicker or darken with direful meanings alien from their natures.

In this nervous condition old Mildred found her.

“I come, ma’am, to know what you’d wish to be done,” said she, standing at the door with her usual grim little courtesy.

“I don’t quite understand—done about what?” inquired she.

“I mean, ma’am, Tom said you asked him to be ready to drive you from here; but as master hadn’t come back, and things is changed a bit here, I thought ye might wish to make a change, mayhap.”

“Oh, oh! thank you, Mrs. Tarnley; I forgot, I’ve been so frightened. Oh, Mrs. Tarnley, I wish I could cry—I’d be so much better, I’m sure, if I could cry—I feel my throat so odd and my head so confused—it seems so many days. If I could think of anything to make me cry.”

Mildred looked at her from the corners of her eyes darkly, as if with a hard heart, but I think she pitied her.

“That blind woman’s gone, the beast—I’m glad she’s away; and you’ll be the better o’ that, ma’am, I’m thinkin’. I was afeard o’ her a’most myself ever since last night; and Master Charles is gone, too, but he’ll be back soon.”

“He’ll come today?” she asked, in consternation.

“Today, of course, ma’am—in an hour or less, I do suppose; and it would not be well done, I’m thinkin’, ma’am, for you to leave the Grange, till you see him again, for it’s like enough he’ll a’ changed his plans.”

“I was thinking so myself. I’d rather wait here to see him—he had so much to distract him that he may easily think differently by this time. I’m glad, Mrs. Tarnley, you think so, for now I feel confident I may wait for his return—I think I ought to wait—and thank you, Mrs. Tarnley, for advising me in the midst of my distractions.”

“I just speak my mind, ma’am, and counsel’s no command, as they say; and I never liked meddlers; and don’t love to burn my fingers in other people’s brewes; so ye’ll please to mind, ma’am, ’tis for your own ear I speak, and your own wit will judge; and I wouldn’t have Master Charles looking askew, nor like to be shent by him for what’s kindly meant to you—not that I owe much kindness nowhere, for since I could scour a platter I ever ............