But his wife was not asleep, and she had been well aware of his presence on her threshold.  While he stood there, she had held her breath, “willing” him to go away again; possessed by a silent passion of rage and repulsion.  When he closed the door behind him, she lay wide awake, trembling at all the night sounds in the house, lost in a thousand terrors and wild regrets.

Suddenly, with a crash the casement window at the farther end of the room burst open under an onset of wind, Netta only just stifled the scream on her lips.  She sat up, her teeth chattering.  It was awful; but she must get up and shut it.  Shivering, she crept out of bed, threw a shawl round her, and made one flight across the floor, possessed with a mad alarm lest the candle, which was flickering in the draught, should go out, and leave her in darkness.

But now that the window was open she saw, as she approached, that the night was not dark.  There was a strong moonlight outside, and when she reached the window she drew in her breath.  For there, close upon her, as it seemed, like one of her own Apennines risen and stalking through the night, towered a great mountain, cloud-wreathed, and gashed with vast ravines.  The moon was shining on it between two chasing clouds, and the light and shade of the great spectacle, its illumined slopes, and impenetrable abysses, were at once magnificent and terrible.

Netta shut the window with groping, desperate hands, and rushed back to bed.  Never had she felt so desolate, so cut off from all that once made her poor little life worth living.  Yet, though she cried for a few minutes in sheer self-pity, it was not long before she too was asleep.

II

The day after the Melroses’ arrival at the Tower was once more a day of rain—­not now the tempestuous storm rain which had lashed the mill stream to fury, and blustered round the house as they stepped into it, but one of those steady, gray, and featureless downpours that Westmoreland and Cumbria know so well.  The nearer mountains which were wholly blotted out, and of the far Helvellyn range and the Derwentwater hills not a trace emerged.  All colour had gone from the grass and the autumn trees; a few sheep and a solitary pony in the fields near the house stood forlorn and patient under the deluge; heaven and earth met in one fusion of rain just beyond the neglected garden that filled the front court; while on three sides of the house, and penetrating through every nook and corner of it, there rose, from depths far below, the roar of the stream which circled the sandstone rock whereon the Tower was built.