“Oh, ma’am, don’t be fretted; don’t take it to heart, ma’am,” said the maid, clasping her hands together in anguish.

“Anything, anything, Willett; only speak at once,” she answered.

“Well, ma’am, it is soon said—­it is easy told.  The master, ma’am—­the master is gone with the Frenchwoman; they went in the traveling coach last night, ma’am; he is gone away with her, ma’am; that is all.”

Mrs. Marston looked at the girl with a gaze of stupefied, stony terror; not a muscle of her face moved; not one heaving respiration showed that she was living.  Motionless, with this fearful look fixed upon the girl, and her thin hands stretched towards her, she remained, second after second.  At last her outstretched hands began to tremble more and more violently; and as if for the first time the knowledge of this calamity had reached her, with a cry, as though body and soul were parting, she fell back motionless in her bed.

Several hours had passed before Mrs. Marston was restored to consciousness.  To this state of utter insensibility, one of silent, terrified stupor succeeded; and it was not until she saw her daughter Rhoda standing at her bedside, weeping, that she found voice and recollection to speak.

“My child; my darling, my poor child,” she cried, sobbing piteously, as she drew her to her heart and looked in her face alternately—­“my darling, my darling child!”

Rhoda could only weep, and return her poor mother’s caresses in silence.  Too young and inexperienced to understand the full extent and nature of this direful calamity, the strange occurrence, the general and apparent consternation of the whole household, and the spectacle of her mother’s agony, had filled her with fear, perplexity, and anguish.  Scared and stunned with a vague sense of danger, like a young bird that, for the first time, cowers under a thunderstorm, she nestled in her mother’s bosom; there, with a sense of protection, and of boundless love and tenderness, she lay frightened, wondering, and weeping.

Two or three days passed, and Dr. Danvers came and sate for several hours with poor Mrs. Marston.  To comfort and console were, of course, out of his power.  The nature of the bereavement, far more terrible than death—­its recent occurrence—­the distracting consciousness of all its complicated consequences—­rendered this a hopeless task.  She bowed herself under the blow with the submission of a broken heart.  The hope to which she had clung for years had vanished; the worst that ever her imagination feared had come in earnest.

One idea was now constantly present in her mind.  She felt a sad, but immovable assurance, that she should not live long, and the thought, “what will become of my darling when I am gone; who will guard and love my child when I am in my grave; to whom is she to look for tenderness and protection then?” perpetually haunted her, and superadded the pangs of a still wilder despair to the desolation of a broken heart.