"I do love the poor children," she said, as Grantley pressed her hand. He sat down to his vigil. The house became very still. Once or twice steps passed to and fro in the room above; then there was silence. In a quarter of an hour, perhaps, there were steps again; then another interval of quiet. This alternation of movement and rest went on for a long time. If Harriet Courtland slept, her sleep was broken. But presently Grantley ceased to mark the sound--ceased even to think of the Courtlands or of the house where he was. Led by the experiences of the day and by the feelings they had evoked, his thoughts took their way to Milldean, to his own home, to his wife and son. How nearly tragedy had come there too! Nay, was it yet gone? Was not its shadow still over the house? And why? He looked back again at the Courtlands--at Harriet's unhallowed rage, at Tom's weakness and desertion, at the fate of the children--not thought of and forgotten by the one, ill-used and put in terror by the other. He recollected how once they used to joke about the Courtlands' being at any rate useful as a warning. That joke had taken on too keen an edge to sound mirthful now. But the serious truth in it came home to him, making plain what he had been groping after ever since that night at the Sailors' Rest at Fairhaven, ever since Sibylla had opened her mouth against him and spoken the bitterness of her heart. Yes, he thought he saw where the truth lay now. Calamity held up a torch to light his wandering feet. No borrowed light had made plain the steps of the woman upstairs. The glare of her own ruin had been needed to illuminate the way she trod, so dense was the turbid darkness of her spirit. She saw now where she stood--and there seemed no going back. She had fallen into fits of remorse before--she had called herself cursed over her betrayal of Christine: that was nothing to this; yet she remembered it now, and it went to swell the wave of despair which overwhelmed her. Well might her eyes look like the eyes of one in hell, for she was cut off from all love and sympathy. She herself had severed all those bonds whereby a human being becomes other than a roving solitary brute. There was no re-binding them. Nobody would come near her; nobody could endure her presence; she was a thing of hatred and of fear. Even Suzette Bligh shrank while she served, and loathed while she ministered. Her husband could not trust himself in the house with her, and she could not be trusted in the room with her children. By the narrowest luck she was not a murderess; in the hearts of all, and in her own heart, she seemed a leper--a leper among people who were whole--an unclean thing--because of her bestial rage.