In the other house old Carvil, wallowing regally in his arm-chair, with a globe lamp burning by his side on the table, yelled for her, in a fiendish voice:  “Bessie!  Bessie! you Bessie!”

She heard him at last, and, as if overcome by fate, began to totter silently back toward her stuffy little inferno of a cottage.  It had no lofty portal, no terrific inscription of forfeited hopes—­she did not understand wherein she had sinned.

Captain Hagberd had gradually worked himself into a state of noisy happiness up there.

“Go in!  Keep quiet!” she turned upon him tearfully, from the doorstep below.

He rebelled against her authority in his great joy at having got rid at last of that “something wrong.”  It was as if all the hopeful madness of the world had broken out to bring terror upon her heart, with the voice of that old man shouting of his trust in an everlasting to-morrow.