"Be silent, Jelly. I cannot listen to this folly," came the stern interruption. "You have no right to let your imagination run away with you, and then talk of it as reality. I desire that you will never speak another word upon the subject to me; or to any one." Jelly's green eyes seem to have borrowed the doctor's bewildered look. She gazed into his face. This was a most curious business: she could not see as yet the faintest gleam of a solution to it. "It was surely her I saw on the landing, sir, dead or alive. I could swear to it. Such things have been heard of before now as swoons being mistaken for death. When poor Mrs. Rane was left alone after her death--that is, her supposed death--if she revived; and got up; and came out upon the landing----" "Hold your tongue," interposed the doctor, sharply. "How dare you persist in this nonsense, woman! You must be mad or dreaming. An hour before the time you speak of, my poor wife, dead and cold, was where she is now--fastened down in her shell." He abruptly left the room with an indignant movement; leaving Jelly speechless with horror. "Fastened down," ran her thoughts, "at twelve o'clock--dead and cold--and I saw her on the landing at one! Oh, my goodness, what does it mean?" CHAPTER XV. DESOLATION. At the front-parlour window at Eastsea, sat Ellen Adair--looking for one who did not come. Whatever troubles, trials, mysteries might be passing elsewhere, Eastsea was going through its usual monotonous routine. How monotonous, Ellen Adair could have told: and yet, even here, something like mystery seemed to be looming in the air. "Come what may, Ellen, I shall be down again within a few hours," had been Arthur Bohun's parting words to her. But the hours and the days passed on, and he came not. To have one's marriage suddenly interrupted, and the bridegroom borne off from, as may be said, the very church-door, was not more agreeable to Ellen Adair than it would be to any other young lady. She watched him away in the fly, whilst his kisses were yet warm upon her lips. All that remained, was to make the best of the situation. She took off her bonnet and dress, and locked up the ring and licence he had begged her to take care of. Until the morrow she supposed; only until the morrow. Mrs. Cumberland sent out a message to her own flyman to the effect that, finding herself unable to get up, she could not take her drive, but he was to bring the fly at the same hour on the morrow. Mrs. Cumberland also wrote a line to the clergyman. The morrow came; and went. Ellen scarcely stirred from the window, which commanded a view of the road from the station; but she did not see Captain Bohun. "Sir Nash's son must be worse, and he cannot leave," she said to herself, striving to account for the delay, whilst at the same time a vague undercurrent of uneasiness lay within her, which she did her best not to recognize or listen to. "There will be a letter tomorrow morning--or he himself will come."