“Good night, Miss!” said Lizzie Hexam, sorrowfully.
“Hah!—Good night!” returned Miss Abbey with a shake of her head.
“Believe me, Miss Abbey, I am truly grateful all the same.”
“I can believe a good deal,” returned the stately Abbey, “so I’ll try to believe that too, Lizzie.”
No supper did Miss Potterson take that night, and only half her usual tumbler of hot Port Negus. And the female domestics—two robust sisters, with staring black eyes, shining flat red faces, blunt noses, and strong black curls, like dolls—interchanged the sentiment that Missis had had her hair combed the wrong way by somebody. And the potboy afterwards remarked, that he hadn’t been “so rattled to bed,” since his late mother had systematically accelerated his retirement to rest with a poker.
The chaining of the door behind her, as she went forth, disenchanted Lizzie Hexam of that first relief she had felt. The night was black and shrill, the riverside wilderness was melancholy, and there was a sound of casting-out, in the rattling of the iron-links, and the grating of the bolts and staples under Miss Abbey’s hand. As she came beneath the lowering sky, a sense of being involved in a murky shade of murder dropped upon her; and, as the tidal swell of the river broke at her feet without her seeing how it gathered, so, her thoughts startled her by rushing out of an unseen void and striking at her heart.
Of her father’s being groundlessly suspected, she felt sure. Sure. Sure. And yet, repeat the word inwardly as often as she would, the attempt to