“Peace?” she repeated, driven mad by the mockery of the word. She saw the door half-open, the warm light glimmering within the hall--so soft--so home-like. The torture was too strong--her senses began to give way. Without knowing what she did, without any settled purpose except to escape from the misery of that sight, Agatha pushed her husband from her, turned and fled--fled anywhere, no matter where, so that it was into night and darkness, away from her home and from him. She did not know the way; she only knew that she ran up one street and down another like the wind. Her state of mind was bordering on insanity. At length she paused from sheer exhaustion, and leaned against a doorway--like any poor outraged homeless wretch. The good man of the house came softly out to look up into the quiet night before he bolted his door. He stood musing, contemplating the stars. It was a minute or more before he noticed the bowed human form beside him. When he did, there was no mistaking the compassionate voice. “Eh, poor soul! What's wrong wi'ee?” Agatha sprang up with a cry. There were two standing by her, from whose presence she would gladly have run to the world's end--Mr. Dugdale and her husband. The one remained petrified with astonishment--the other said but three words, in a dull mechanical voice, as if every feeling had been struck out of the man by some thunderbolt of doom. “Agatha, come home.” Again she tried to burst from him and fly, but her arm was caught, and Marmaduke Dugdale's grave look--the look he fixed upon his own children when they erred, constraining them always into repentance and goodness--was reading her inmost soul. “Go home, poor child! I'll not tell of you or him. Go home with your husband.” She felt her hand laid, or grasped--she knew not which--in that of Nathanael; who held it with invincible firmness. There was no resisting that clasp. She rose up and followed him, as if led by an invisible chain. Her madness had passed, and left only a dull indifference to everything. The die was cast; she had laid open the miseries of their home, had disgraced him and herself before the world. It signified little where she went or what she did; they were utterly separated now. Without again speaking, or taking notice of Mr. Dugdale, she suffered Nathanael to lead her away, passing swiftly down the silent streets. Neither husband nor wife uttered a single word. The moment she entered the house she walked up-stairs, slowly, that he might not see her tottering; went into her own room, and locked her door with a loud, fierce turning of the key, that seemed to shriek as it turned.