old man--and God knows what! Her heart was beating rapidly, her breath
was hurried, but she ran back to the stile.
He was not there. The field sloped away on either side of it. But she
could distinguish nothing in the pouring rain above the wind-swept
meadow. He must have gone home. Relieved for a moment she turned and
hurried on towards the Priory.
But at every step she was followed, not by the old man's presence, but
by what he had said to her, which she could not shake off as she had
shaken off his detaining fingers. Was it the ravings of insanity, or had
she stumbled unwittingly upon some secret--was it after all a SECRET?
Perhaps it was something they all knew, or would know later. And she had
come down here for this. For back of her indignation, back even of her
disbelief in his insanity, there was an awful sense of truth! The names
he had flung out, of "Debs," "Debban," and "Debbrook" now flashed upon
her as something she had seen before, but had not understood. Until she
satisfied herself of this, she felt she could not live or breathe! She
loathed the Priory, with its austere exclusiveness, as it rose before
her; she wished she had never entered it; but it contained that which
she must know, and know at once! She entered the nearest door and ran
up the grand staircase. Her flushed face and disordered appearance were
easily accounted for by her exposure to the sudden storm. She went to
her bedroom, sent her maid to another room to prepare a change of dress,
and sinking down before her traveling-desk, groped for a document. Ah!
there it was--the expensive toy that she had played with! She hastily
ran over its leaves to the page she already remembered. And there, among
the dashes and perpendicular lines she had jested over last night, on
which she had thought was a collateral branch of the line, stood her
father's name and that of Richard, his uncle, with the bracketed note in
red ink, "see Debbrook, Daybrook, Debbers, and Debs." Yes! this gaunt,
half-crazy, overworked peasant, content to rake the dead leaves before
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