was sound asleep, dreaming I was away in some strange place, a pain
suddenly shot into my arm there, and was so keen as to awaken me. I must
have struck it in the daytime, I suppose, though I don't remember doing
so.' She added, laughing, 'I tell my dear husband that it looks just as
if he had flown into a rage and struck me there. O, I daresay it will
soon disappear.'

'Ha, ha! Yes . . . On what night did it come?'

Mrs. Lodge considered, and said it would be a fortnight ago on the
morrow. 'When I awoke I could not remember where I was,' she added,
'till the clock striking two reminded me.'

She had named the night and the hour of Rhoda's spectral encounter, and
Brook felt like a guilty thing. The artless disclosure startled her; she
did not reason on the freaks of coincidence; and all the scenery of that
ghastly night returned with double vividness to her mind.

'O, can it be,' she said to herself, when her visitor had departed, 'that
I exercise a malignant power over people against my own will?' She knew
that she had been slily called a witch since her fall; but never having
understood why that particular stigma had been attached to her, it had
passed disregarded. Could this be the explanation, and had such things
as this ever happened before?



CHAPTER IV--A SUGGESTION