She caught Jane’s hand and held it hard.  Her eyes wandered over the avenue of big trees, which no one but herself came near at this hour.  It would have been so lonely, so lonely!

The gardener went away, still looking less ruddy than he had looked when he arrived on the spot.  Lady Walderhurst rose from her seat on the mossy tree-trunk.  She rose quite slowly.

“Don’t speak to me yet, Jane,” she said.  And with Jane following her at a respectful distance, she returned to the house and went to her room to lie down.

There was nothing to prove that the whole thing was not mere chance, mere chance.  It was this which turned her cold.  It was all impossible.  The little bridge had been entirely unused for so long a time, it had been so slight a structure from the first; it was old, and she remembered now that Walderhurst had once said that it must be examined and strengthened if it was to be used.  She had leaned upon the rail often lately; one evening she had wondered if it seemed quite as steady as usual.  What could she say, whom could she accuse, because a piece of rotten wood had given away.

She started on her pillow.  It was a piece of rotten wood which had fallen from the balustrade upon the stairs, to be seen and picked up by Jane just before she would have passed down on her way to dinner.  And yet, what would she appear to her husband, to Lady Maria, to anyone in the decorous world, if she told them that she believed that in a dignified English household, an English gentleman, even a deposed heir presumptive, was working out a subtle plot against her such as might adorn a melodrama?  She held her head in her hands as her mind depicted to her Lord Walderhurst’s countenance, Lady Maria’s dubious, amused smile.

“She would think I was hysterical,” she cried, under her breath.  “He would think I was vulgar and stupid, that I was a fussy woman with foolish ideas, which made him ridiculous.  Captain Os-born is of his family.  I should be accusing him of being a criminal.  And yet I might have been in the bottomless pond, in the bottomless pond, and no one would have known.”

If it all had not seemed so incredible to her, if she could have felt certain herself, she would not have been overwhelmed with this sense of being baffled, bewildered, lost.

The Ayah who so loved Hester might hate her rival.  A jealous native woman might be capable of playing stealthy tricks, which, to her strange mind, might seem to serve a proper end.  Captain Osborn might not know.  She breathed again as this thought came to her.  He could not know; it would be too insane, too dangerous, too wicked.

And yet, if she had been flung headlong down the staircase, if the fall had killed her, where would have been the danger for the man who would only have deplored a fatal accident.  If she had leaned upon the rail and fallen into the black depths of water below, what could have been blamed but a piece of rotten wood.  She touched her forehead with her handkerchief because it felt cold and damp.  There was no way out.  Her teeth chattered.