If it were so, it was but for a second’s space. The fog closed in thicker again than before, the torrent came roaring down in fiercer, madder flood, and wheeling his horse round, and spurring him furiously, it was all that Jasper St. Aubyn could do, by dint of hand and foot, and as iron a heart as ever man possessed, to avoid following his victim to her watery grave. Once safe, he cast one last glance to the rocks, to the river, but he saw, heard nothing. He whirled the bloody whip over the falls, plunged his spurs, rowel-deep, into the horse’s sides, and with hell in his heart, he galloped, like one pursued by the furies of the slain, back, alone, to Widecomb. CHAPTER IV. _The Vengeance._ A change came o’er the spirit of my dream, The wanderer was returned. BYRON. It was not yet high noon, when, wet from spur to shoulder with mud and spray, bloody with spurring, spotted from head to heel with gory foam-flakes from his jaded horse’s wide-distended jaws, and quivering nostrils, bareheaded, pale as death, and hoarse with shouting, Jasper St. Aubyn galloped frantically up to the terrace-steps of Widecomb House; and springing to the ground, reeled, and would have fallen headlong had he not been caught in the arms of one of the serving men, who came running down the stone stairs to assist him. As soon as he could collect breath to speak, “Call all!” he cried, “call all! Ring the great bell, call all—get ladders, ropes—run—ride—she is gone—she is lost—swept over the black falls at Hawkshurt! Oh God! oh God!” and he fell, as it seemed, senseless to the earth. Acting—sheer acting, all! They raised him and carried him up stairs, and laid him on the bed—on _her_ bed—the bed whereon he had kissed her lips last night, and clasped her lovely form which was now haply entwined in the loathsome coils of the slimy mud-eels. He shuddered. He could not endure it. He opened his eyes again, and feigning to recover his senses, chid the men from his presence, and again commanded, so peremptorily, that none dare disobey him, that every servant—man, woman, maid or boy—should begone to the place he had named, nor return till they brought back his lost angel’s body. They believed that he was mad; but mad or sane, his anger was so terrible at all times, and now so fierce, so frantic and appalling, that none dared to gainsay him. Within half an hour after his return, save himself, there was not a human being left within the walls of Widecomb Manor. Then he arose and descended slowly, but with a firm foot and unchanged brow, into the great library of the Hall. It was a vast, gloomy, oblong chamber, nearly a hundred feet in length, wainscoted and shelved with old black-oak, and dimly lighted by a range of narrow windows, with dark-stained glass and heavily wrought stone mullions.