Janet said she would look directly, and turned with Mr. Pittman into the house.  But the search would take her some time, so he bade her good-bye, and she went at once to a bureau which stood in a small back-room, where Dempster used sometimes to write letters and receive people who came on business out of office hours.  She had looked through the contents of the bureau more than once; but today, on removing the last bundle of letters from one of the compartments, she saw what she had never seen before, a small nick in the wood, made in the shape of a thumb-nail, evidently intended as a means of pushing aside the movable back of the compartment.  In her examination hitherto she had not found such a letter as Mr. Pittman had described—­perhaps there might be more letters behind this slide.  She pushed it back at once, and saw—­no letters, but a small spirit-decanter, half full of pale brandy, Dempster’s habitual drink.

An impetuous desire shook Janet through all her members; it seemed to master her with the inevitable force of strong fumes that flood our senses before we are aware.  Her hand was on the decanter:  pale and excited, she was lifting it out of its niche, when, with a start and a shudder, she dashed it to the ground, and the room was filled with the odour of the spirit.  Without staying to shut up the bureau, she rushed out of the room, snatched up her bonnet and mantle which lay in the dining-room, and hurried out of the house.

Where should she go?  In what place would this demon that had re-entered her be scared back again?  She walks rapidly along the street in the direction of the church.  She is soon at the gate of the churchyard; she passes through it, and makes her way across the graves to a spot she knows—­a spot where the turf was stirred not long ago, where a tomb is to be erected soon.  It is very near the church wall, on the side which now lies in deep shadow, quite shut out from the rays of the westering sun by a projecting buttress.

Janet sat down on the ground.  It was a sombre spot.  A thick hedge, surmounted by elm-trees, was in front of her; a projecting buttress on each side.  But she wanted to shut out even these objects.  Her thick crape veil was down; but she closed her eyes behind it, and pressed her hands upon them.  She wanted to summon up the vision of the past; she wanted to lash the demon out of her soul with the stinging memories of the bygone misery; she wanted to renew the old horror and the old anguish, that she might throw herself with the more desperate clinging energy at the foot of the cross, where the Divine Sufferer would impart divine strength.  She tried to recall those first bitter moments of shame, which were like the shuddering discovery of the leper that the dire taint is upon him; the deeper and deeper lapse; the on-coming of settled despair; the awful moments by the bedside of her self-maddened husband.  And then she tried to live through, with a remembrance made more vivid by that contrast, the blessed hours of hope and joy and peace that had come to her of late, since her whole soul had been bent towards the attainment of purity and holiness.