burdened sleeper: her thought being, "How can you act so cruelly to
Robert!" He passed up Wrexby Heath, and over the black burnt patch where
the fire had caught the furzes on a dry Maynight, and sank on the side of
the Hall.

When we have looked upon a picture of still green life with a troubled
soul, and the blow falls on us, we accuse Nature of our own treachery to
her. Rhoda hurried from the dairy-door to shut herself up in her room
and darken the light surrounding her. She had turned the lock, and was
about systematically to pull down the blind, when the marvel of beholding
Dahlia stepping out of the garden made her for a moment less the creature
of her sickened senses. Dahlia was dressed for a walk, and she went very
fast. The same paralysis of motion afflicted Rhoda as when she was
gazing after her father; but her hand stretched out instinctively for her
bonnet when Dahlia had crossed the green and the mill-bridge, and was no
more visible. Rhoda drew her bonnet on, and caught her black silk mantle
in her hand, and without strength to throw it across her shoulders,
dropped before her bed, and uttered a strange prayer. "Let her die
rather than go back to disgrace, my God! my God!"

She tried to rise, and failed in the effort, and superstitiously renewed
her prayer. "Send death to her rather!"--and Rhoda's vision under her
shut eyes conjured up clouds and lightnings, and spheres in
conflagration.

There is nothing so indicative of fevered or of bad blood as the tendency
to counsel the Almighty how he shall deal with his creatures. The strain
of a long uncertainty, and the late feverish weeks had distempered the
fine blood of the girl, and her acts and words were becoming remoter
exponents of her character.