One choking sob escaped the woman, and feeling dizzy she sat down, almost fell, on the bank, and supporting her head on her hands gazed into vacancy with an awful look upon her fixed features, a look that told clearly of her soul's utter despair. Mary ran up to her in great bewilderment and alarm, knelt before her, stroked her hand with her own, fondled her. "Mother, my dear mother, what is it? What can I do?" Catherine still answered nothing, but she slowly raised her now ghastly white face toward the girl's; turned her eyes that seemed dim, and to have no sense in them upon her; eyes that looked at her, yet appeared not to see, as those of one sightless; and the nervously twitching mouth moved as if speaking, but no words came forth. "Mother! mother!" cried the terrified girl. "Speak to me--are you ill--I will get you some water--wait for me, only a few moments and I will fetch assistance." "No, no, no!" cried the woman in a spasmodic way. "No! I am better--it is nothing--stay here--fetch nobody--I have something to say to you." She spoke with such a stem authority that the girl could not but obey. Then came a long silence, a great suspense--the girl watching her mistress with open, frightened eyes; the woman sitting motionless with a fixed inscrutable look again on her features, as if absorbed in painfully intense thought. But Catherine King was not thinking at all. The image of Mary, the touch of the dear hand, had fascinated her, had paralyzed her brain for the time. She was conscious of no mental operations; memory and emotion were effaced. Her mind was a blank, or rather in a state of expectant attention, waiting for some accident to wake it again to a rush of thought; like a magazine of powder, inactive till the spark should come. Such a complete suspension of the mental faculties often succeeds to excessive excitement and conflict of ideas, only to precede another mightier wave of emotion, and fiercer gust of will, even as the calm precedes the storm. Of a sudden the spark came, the mind was at work again. But a strange thing had come to pass. It seemed to Catherine as if her brain had become a mere machine. Will was dead; there was no deliberation, no weighing of conflicting motives; but some other power, some dominant idea that had come from outside, took the place of will, and worked the mind--drove it along one narrow groove, allowing it to go neither to the right nor to the left, but straight on, wandering into no side associations, hindered by no opposing fears, hopes, or memories. It was if some demon had possessed her, before whom her reason bowed, a demon whose biddings she must obey without resistance.