“What do I care?  Why should I care?”

And she laughed terribly.

I made haste to leave the room and the house; but I lingered for nearly an hour about the place before I could make up my mind to go home, so much was I afraid lest she should do something altogether insane.

But at length I saw the candle appear in the shop, which was some relief to my anxiety; and reflecting that her one consuming thought of revenge was some security for her conduct otherwise, I went home.

That night my own troubles seemed small to me, and I did not brood over them at all.  My mind was filled with the idea of the sad misery which, rather than in which, that poor woman was; and I prayed for her as for a desolate human world whose sun had deserted the heavens, whose fair fields, rivers, and groves were hardening into the frost of death, and all their germs of hope becoming but portions of the lifeless mass.  “If I am sorrowful,” I said, “God lives none the less.  And His will is better than mine, yea, is my hidden and perfected will.  In Him is my life.  His will be done.  What, then, is my trouble compared to hers?  I will not sink into it and be selfish.”

In the morning my first business was to inquire after her.  I found her in the shop, looking very ill, and obstinately reserved.  Gerard sat in a corner, looking as far from happy as a child of his years could look.  As I left the shop he crept out with me.

“Gerard, come back,” cried his mother.

“I will not take him away,” I said.

The boy looked up in my face, as if he wanted to whisper to me, and I stooped to listen.

“I dreamed last night,” said the boy, “that a big angel with white wings came and took me out of my bed, and carried me high, high up—­so high that I could not dream any more.”

“We shall be carried up so high one day, Gerard, my boy, that we shall not want to dream any more.  For we shall be carried up to God himself.  Now go back to your mother.”

He obeyed at once, and I went on through the village.

CHAPTER XXIII.

The devil in the vicar.

I wanted just to pass the gate, and look up the road towards Oldcastle Hall.  I thought to see nothing but the empty road between the leafless trees, lying there like a dead stream that would not bear me on to the “sunny pleasure-dome with caves of ice” that lay beyond.  But just as I reached the gate, Miss Oldcastle came out of the lodge, where I learned afterwards the woman that kept the gate was ill.