“Never!  I’ll die sooner.  Not that you will care for that.  I tell you I saw my Christopher last night—­in a dream.  He had a beard; but I saw him, oh, so plain; and he said, ‘Is this the way you keep your promise?’ That is enough for me.  I have prayed, again and again, to his star, for light.  I am so perplexed and harassed by you all, and you make me believe what you like.  Well, I have had a revelation.  It is not my poor lost darling’s wish I should wed again.  I don’t believe Mr. Falcon any more.  I hear nothing but lies by day.  The truth comes to my bedside at night.  I will not marry this man.”

“Consider, Rosa, your credit is pledged.  You must not be always jilting him heartlessly.  Dreams! nonsense.  There—­I love peace.  It is no use your storming at me; rave to the moon and the stars, if you like, and when you have done, do pray come in, and behave like a rational woman, who has pledged her faith to an honorable man, and a man of vast estates—­a man that nursed your husband in his last illness, found your child, at a great expense, when you had lost him, and merits eternal gratitude, not eternal jilting.  I have no patience with you.”

The old gentleman retired in high dudgeon.

Staines stood in the black shade of his cedar-tree, rooted to the ground by this revelation of male villany and female credulity.

He did not know what on earth to do.  He wanted to kill Falcon, but not to terrify his own wife to death.  It was now too clear she thought he was dead.

Rosa watched her father’s retiring figure out of sight.  “Very well,” said she, clenching her teeth; then suddenly she turned, and looked up to heaven.  “Do you hear?” said she, “my Christie’s star?  I am a poor perplexed creature.  I asked you for a sign, and that very night I saw him in a dream.  Why should I marry out of gratitude?  Why should I marry one man, when I love another?  What does it matter his being dead?  I love him too well to be wife to any living man.  They persuade me, they coax me, they pull me, they push me.  I see they will make me.  But I will outwit them.  See—­see!” and she held up a little phial in the moonlight.  “This shall cut the knot for me; this shall keep me true to my Christie, and save me from breaking promises I ought never to have made.  This shall unite me once more with him I killed, and loved.”

She meant she would kill herself the night before the wedding, which perhaps she would not, and perhaps she would.  Who can tell?  The weak are violent.  But Christopher, seeing the poison so near her lips, was perplexed, took two strides, wrenched it out of her hand, with a snarl of rage, and instantly plunged into the shade again.

Rosa uttered a shriek, and flew into the house.

The farther she got, the more terrified she became, and soon Christopher heard her screaming in the drawing-room in an alarming way.  They were like the screams of the insane.