"Hush, Tituba, hush, if you love me! I don't mean to be cross; but my head is full of awful thoughts; they make me say cruel things even to poor old Tituba." "The poor child--and she will take nothing," said the old woman, while her face, dark and wrinkled like a dried peach, began to work, the nearest approach to weeping her Indian blood ever permitted. "What can I do? Where is the young brave?" "Yonder," said Elizabeth, bitterly, "going toward the sea!" "Shall I bring him back? Shall I tell him he has left your heart full of tears?" Tituba clenched her little withered hands with energy, as if she were about to give a leap, and start off at full speed, while her sharp eyes followed the retreating figure of the young man. But Elizabeth held her back. "No, no. See, Abigail is coming down. I will tell her. Abigail! cousin Abigail!" But Abigail Williams, who had been so caressing and kind half an hour before, came into the passage with the dull, heavy frown on her forehead which had become habitual now; answering her cousin's appeal with a repulsive motion of the hand, she passed by her, and went into the open air. The sun was very bright, and for an instant she stood upon the stepping-stone, shading her eyes with one hand, looking first toward the forest, and again, with more lingering earnestness, sweeping the horizon with her gaze, where the sky melted into the ocean. A boat lay like a speck amid the brightness of the water. If Abigail had not been searching for it, an object so diminished by distance would have escaped observation. But she saw the floating speck, and, without a look or word for those she left behind, started off for the shore. CHAPTER XXXV. UNACCOUNTABLE SYMPATHIES. Barbara Stafford sat upon the roots of an old oak, that held the edges of forest turf together, just where they verged into the white sands of the beach. The woods had been thinned on that portion of the coast, and the oak stood out almost alone, amid a sea of whortleberry bushes, ferns, and low-vined blackberries, that covered the sparse soil with their many-tinted herbage. Behind her loomed the forest; before her rolled the ocean. The sunshine lay upon both, turning one to sapphires, the other to shifting emeralds. The sunshine lay everywhere, save in her own heart--there was unutterably darkened. I do not say that all this brightness in nature fell around her like a mockery; for her soul was too heavy even for a thought of external objects. It is only sudden or light sorrows that shrink and thrill to outward things. When depression becomes the habit of a life, it weighs upon the existence, as stagnant waters sleep in a landscape. When they are disturbed, miasma starts forth, and makes the earth feel that a weight is forever upon its bosom, whose breath is poison, which no power can fathom, and brightness can warm.