"Oh, I have left them somewhere there, I suppose." He drew her arm within his own. "Come, my dear, let us go home. Margaret is gone." "Gone! Why? Is not she well? It is not so very cold." "She has got wet, and she has gone home to warm herself." Hester did not wait to speak again to the Greys when she comprehended that her sister had been in the river. Her husband was obliged to forbid her walking so fast, and assured her all the way that there was nothing to fear. Hester reproached him for his coolness. "You need not reproach me," said he. "I shall never cease to reproach myself for letting her go where she did." And yet his heart told him that he had only acted according to his deliberate design of keeping aloof from all Margaret's pursuits and amusements that were not shared with her sister. And as for the risk, he had seen fifty people walking across the ice this very morning. Judging by the event, however, he very sincerely declared that he should never forgive himself for having left her. When they reached home, Margaret was quite warm and comfortable, and her hair drying rapidly under Morris's hands. Hester was convinced that everybody might dine as usual. Margaret herself came down-stairs to tea; and the only consequence of the accident seemed to be, that Charles was kept very busy opening the door to inquirers how Miss Ibbotson was this evening. It made Hope uneasy to perceive how much Margaret remembered of what had passed around her in the midst of the bustle of the morning. If she was still aware of some circumstances that she mentioned, might she not retain others--the words extorted from him, the frantic action which he now blushed to remember? "Brother," said she, "what _was_ the meaning of something that I heard some one say, just as I sat up on the bank? `There's a baulk for the doctor! He is baulked of a body in his own house.'" "Oh, Margaret," cried her sister, who sat looking at her all the evening as if they had been parted for ten years, "you dreamed that. It was a fancy. Think what a state your poor head was in! It may have a few strange imaginations left in it still. May it not, Edward?" "This is not one," he replied. "She heard very accurately." "What did they mean?" "There is a report abroad about me, arising out of the old prejudice about dissection. Some of my neighbours think that dissecting is the employment and the passion of my life, and that I rob the churchyard as often as anybody is buried." "Oh, Edward! how frightful! how ridiculous!" "It is very disagreeable, my dear. I am taunted with this wherever I go." "What is to be done?" "We must wait till the prejudices against me die out: but I see that we shall have to wait some time; for before one suspicion is given up, another rises."