A fretting, gusty wind beat against the window, with occasional rushes of rain.  Marcella shivered, though she had built up the fire, and put on her cloak.

A few distant sounds from the village street round the corner, the chiming of the church clock, the crackling of the fire close beside her—­she heard everything there was to hear, with unusual sharpness of ear, and imagined more.

All at once restlessness, or some undefined impression, made her look round her.  She saw that the scanty baize curtain was only half-drawn across one of the windows, and she got up to close it.  Fresh from the light of the lamp, she stared through the panes into the night without at first seeing anything.  Then there flashed out upon the dark the door of a public-house to the right, the last in the village road.  A man came out stumbling and reeling; the light within streamed out an instant on the road and the common; then the pursuing rain and darkness fell upon him.

She was drawing back when, with sudden horror, she perceived something else close beside her, pressing against the window.  A woman’s face!—­the powerful black and white of it—­the strong aquiline features—­the mad keenness of the look were all plain to her.  The eyes looked in hungrily at the prostrate form on the settle—­at the sleeping child.  Another figure appeared out of the dark, running up the path.  There was a slight scuffle, and voices outside.  Marcella drew the curtain close with a hasty hand, and sat down hardly able to breathe.  The woman who had looked in was Isabella Westall.  It was said that she was becoming more and more difficult to manage and to watch.

Marcella was some time in recovering herself.  That look, as of a sleepless, hateful eagerness, clung to the memory.  Once or twice, as it haunted her, she got up again to make sure that the door was fast.

The incident, with all it suggested, did but intensify the horror and struggle in which the girl stood, made her mood more strained, more piercingly awake and alert.  Gradually, as the hours passed, as all sounds from without, even that of the wind, died away, and the silence settled round her in ever-widening circles, like deep waters sinking to repose, Marcella felt herself a naked soul, alone on a wide sea, with shapes of pain and agony and revolt.  She looked at the sleeping wife.  “He, too, is probably asleep,” she thought, remembering some information which a kindly warder had given her in a few jerky, well-meant sentences, while she was waiting downstairs in the gaol for Minta Hurd.  “Incredible! only so many hours, minutes left—­so far as any mortal knows—­of living, thinking, recollecting, of all that makes us something as against the nothing of death—­and a man wastes them in sleep, in that which is only meant for the ease and repair of the daily struggle.  And Minta—­her husband is her all—­to-morrow she will have no husband; yet she sleeps, and I have helped to make her.  Ah!  Nature may well despise and trample on us; there is no reason in us—­no dignity!  Oh, why are we here—­why am I here—­to ache like this—­to hate good people like Charles Harden and Mary—­to refuse all I could give—­to madden myself over pain I can never help?  I cannot help it, yet I cannot forsake it; it drives, it clings to me!”