"With Crocker--eh? Happy--eh? Go there! Get on your knees, murderess--look under that blanket and then ax yourself whether your carcase be fit to feed dogs!" She realised in a moment the thing that had happened. She moved the blanket; she touched; she recoiled; but she made no sound. "Your work--your filthy, lewd work, to drive that angel of goodness to make an end of herself. She couldn’t breathe the same air with you no more. Murder, I say, if ever murder was. You--you--to think that you--behind my back--in my home-- You thrust her in the water--you held her down under it! Get out of my sight to hell--hide yourself--call the hills to cover you afore the decent world finds what you are and tears the flesh off your bones!" He flung himself on the dust of his wife, and Rhoda went out of the room. *CHAPTER XV* *NIGHT TENEBRIOUS* Aimless, almost mindless, Rhoda Bowden dragged herself away from the valley under Black Tor. She knew not where to turn. But there awakened no desire to escape from the tyranny of existence; she suffered rather from a mental palsy that blocked and barred every channel of thought or outlook on action. She moved through the night-hidden valley of Meavy, and found herself presently at Sheepstor village. The place slept and she drifted among the darkened cottages, forgetting all else but the problems that now cried vainly to be solved before the coming of another day. By instinct her weary body obeyed the call of least resistance, and she sank down the hill instead of climbing upward. Mechanically she descended, as water seeks its own level, and by a footpath presently reached the bottom of the valley and stood at Marchant’s bridge, a mile under Ringmoor Down. Across that wilderness lay her nearest way home; and now it seemed to her, as she became conscious again of her vicinity and physical condition, that her goal must indeed be Ditsworthy. She was far spent and the time now approached midnight. The hour was dark, mild, very still under a clouded moon; and for a moment, thinking upon the length of the way, Rhoda doubted her strength to reach the warrens. She drank of the river and bathed her face. Then she began the long climb upward to the Moor. Where her path left the main road and ascended easterly, through furze-brakes beside a wood, a tall grey shape, full eight feet high, stood silent by the way. It was Marchant’s Cross that appeared there on her right hand underneath an ash tree; and the monument’s high, squat shoulders and dim suggestion of alert and watchful humanity startled her. Then she remembered what it was, and climbed on.