Here, then, was the whole affair.  Marguerite pressed her hands to her forehead, as if fearful some of the swarming thoughts should escape; then she hastened up the slope behind the house, and entered and hid herself in the woods.  Mr. Raleigh had loved her mother.  Of course, then, there was not a shadow of doubt that her mother had loved him.  Horrible thought! and she shook like an aspen, beneath it.  For a time it seemed that she loathed him,—­that she despised the woman who had given him regard.  The present moment was a point of dreadful isolation; there was no past to remember, no future to expect; she herself was alone and forsaken, the whole world dark, and heaven blank.  But that could not be forever.  As she sat with her face buried in her hands, old words, old looks, flashed on her recollection; she comprehended what long years of silent suffering the one might have endured, what barren yearning the other; she saw how her mother’s haughty calm might be the crust on a lava-sea; she felt what desolation must have filled Roger Raleigh’s heart, when he found that she whom he had loved no longer lived, that he had cherished a lifeless ideal,—­for Marguerite knew from his own lips that he had not met the same woman whom he had left.

She started up, wondering what had led her upon this train of thought, why she had pursued it, and what reason she had for the pain it gave her.  A step rustled among the distant last-year’s leaves; there in the shadowy wood, where she did not dream of concealing her thoughts, where it seemed that all Nature shared her confidence, this step was like a finger laid on the hidden sore.  She paused, a glow rushed over her frame, and her face grew hot with the convicting flush.  Consternation, bitter condemnation, shame, impetuous resolve, swept over her in one torrent, and she saw that she had a secret which every one might touch, and, touching, cause to sting.  She hurried onward through the wood, unconscious how rapidly or how far her heedless course extended.  She sprang across gaps at which she would another time have shuddered; she clambered over fallen trees, penetrated thickets of tangled brier, and followed up the shrunken beds of streams, till suddenly the wood grew thin again, and she emerged upon an open space,—­a long lawn, where the grass grew rank and tall as in deserted graveyards, and on which the afternoon sunshine lay with most dreary, desolate emphasis.  Marguerite had scarcely comprehended herself before; now, as she looked out on the utter loneliness of the place, all joyousness, all content, seemed wiped from the world.  She leaned against a tree where the building rose before her, old and forsaken, washed by rains, beaten by winds.  A blind slung open, loose on a broken hinge; the emptiness of the house looked through it like a spirit.  The woodbine seemed the only living thing about it,—­the woodbine that had swung its clusters, heavy as grapes of Eshcol, along one wall, and, falling from support, had rioted upon the ground in masses of close-netted luxuriance.