His disquietude soon caused him to return to the hotel, in hopes of seeing the object of his thoughts. He had hardly reached the piazza before Ida appeared, dressed in a plain walking suit. She hesitated a moment in the door-way as if undecided in her course. A party of gay young people were just starting on a stroll to a neighboring village. With apparent hesitancy, she said to one of the young girls: "I have an errand to the village; may I walk with you for company?" "Oh, certainly," replied the girl, but evidently not welcoming this addition to their party, and Ida went away with them, but not as one of them, isolated more, however, by her own manner than by the bearing of her companions. The explanation of her action was this: on opening her drawer after returning to her room, she found, with a sense of dismay--as if a misfortune had occurred instead of an incident that gave a chance for better thought--that in taking the opiate the night before, she had replaced the cork in the phial insecurely, and that nearly all its contents had oozed away. Some might have regarded this incident as an omen or a providential interference; but Ida was neither superstitious nor speculative in her nature; she was positive and willful, rather, and the current of her purposes always flowed strongly, though it might be in narrow channels. "There is nothing left for me to do," she muttered, "but go to the village. I don't know whether Mr. Burleigh has laudanum, and my asking for it might excite suspicion." It was terrible to see her fair young face grow hard like marble in her stern determination to carry out her awful design, and the impress of this remorseless purpose filled Van Berg with so great foreboding that he could not resist the impulse to follow the desperate girl. If harm should come to her through the harshness of others, and as he now feared, more especially his own, he would never forgive himself. Mrs. Mayhew and Stanton did not see her departure--they were in anxious consultation in one of the small private parlors, and the artist, to disarm suspicion of his design, entered the hotel, and passed out again by a side door, from which he took a short-cut across the field intending to watch Ida, without being himself observed. Having found some dense copse-wood by the road-side, and near to the village, he sat down and waited. The gay, chattering party soon passed, Ida walking by herself on the opposite side of the road, with head bowed as if wholly wrapped in her own thoughts. Her unhappy face appealed to his sympathy even more than her graceful carriage to his sense of beauty, and he longed to join her and make such amends as were possible.