“How do you know?” she said faintly.  “Who showed it to you?” The blood rushed back into her face—­rushed overwhelmingly, as the sense rushed upon her mind that her own words had betrayed her.  She struck her hands together in despair.  “I never wrote it,” she gasped affrightedly; “I know nothing about it!”

“Yes,” I said, “you wrote it, and you know about it.  It was wrong to send such a letter, it was wrong to frighten Miss Fairlie.  If you had anything to say that it was right and necessary for her to hear, you should have gone yourself to Limmeridge House—­you should have spoken to the young lady with your own lips.”

She crouched down over the flat stone of the grave, till her face was hidden on it, and made no reply.

“Miss Fairlie will be as good and kind to you as her mother was, if you mean well,” I went on.  “Miss Fairlie will keep your secret, and not let you come to any harm.  Will you see her to-morrow at the farm?  Will you meet her in the garden at Limmeridge House?”

“Oh, if I could die, and be hidden and at rest with you!” Her lips murmured the words close on the grave-stone, murmured them in tones of passionate endearment, to the dead remains beneath.  “You know how I love your child, for your sake!  Oh, Mrs. Fairlie!  Mrs. Fairlie! tell me how to save her.  Be my darling and my mother once more, and tell me what to do for the best.”

I heard her lips kissing the stone—­I saw her hands beating on it passionately.  The sound and the sight deeply affected me.  I stooped down, and took the poor helpless hands tenderly in mine, and tried to soothe her.

It was useless.  She snatched her hands from me, and never moved her face from the stone.  Seeing the urgent necessity of quieting her at any hazard and by any means, I appealed to the only anxiety that she appeared to feel, in connection with me and with my opinion of her—­the anxiety to convince me of her fitness to be mistress of her own actions.

“Come, come,” I said gently.  “Try to compose yourself, or you will make me alter my opinion of you.  Don’t let me think that the person who put you in the Asylum might have had some excuse——­”

The next words died away on my lips.  The instant I risked that chance reference to the person who had put her in the Asylum she sprang up on her knees.  A most extraordinary and startling change passed over her.  Her face, at all ordinary times so touching to look at, in its nervous sensitiveness, weakness, and uncertainty, became suddenly darkened by an expression of maniacally intense hatred and fear, which communicated a wild, unnatural force to every feature.  Her eyes dilated in the dim evening light, like the eyes of a wild animal.  She caught up the cloth that had fallen at her side, as if it had been a living creature that she could kill, and crushed it in both her hands with such convulsive strength, that the few drops of moisture left in it trickled down on the stone beneath her.