Isabel had reached the middle of her homeward course before she awoke to any sort of consciousness of what was before her. Was it on such another night as this--darker still, more cloudy and stormy--that one man had struck another down, and wrenched from his breast that little token of innocent affection and tragic misery? O God! could it be? Then she saw herself at the opera, with that fatal eye upon her; she recalled the sense of something malign regarding her, of which she had been conscious in the Manse garden the night before the minister’s death. These recollections and impressions came one by one, each thrusting her through with a sharper and a sharper dart. She tried to escape from them--to think what she ought to do. Something there was that must be done. She was going back to him--her husband, her husband’s slayer--to him who had dared to take her into his arms, knowing the awful ghost that stood between them. Isabel hid her face, as if some accusing eye had looked at her, and cried aloud, in the agony of her shame. How was she polluted!--she who was Margaret’s mother and the minister’s wife! He had come to her with that blood on his hand, knowing his own guilt, and plucked her like a flower--taken her in spite of herself--made her his, to bear his name, and bound her to him for ever and ever. She writhed upon that sword as she sat and rocked herself on the dark wayside. It seemed to her as if some cruel, avenging angel--as if God Himself--had put the bitter weapon through her heart, and held it there, despite her struggles, keeping her to a sense of the deepness of her misery, preventing her from thinking rather what she must do. What was she to do? Oh, if she could only think of that question, instead of writhing and aching, and stabbing herself through and through with this!