Page:Alice Stuyvesant - The Vanity Box.djvu/90

 they were devoted to each other. Yet that "Oh, God, Terry!" What did it mean, that stifled cry of the heart?

Teresina Ricardo would have given a great deal if she had been able to stop her ears and shut out the echo of that cry; but it was inside her head, and could not be shut out.

Her imagination, whose vividness was a curse as well as a blessing in her life, clearly sketched a woman's figure walking under great trees in a wood. Then, another figure grew out of shadows, and followed. Whose figure? Terry had a horrible feeling, born of over-wrought nerves, that if she looked long enough at the picture, she would see whose the shadowy figure was, and know the awful secret of the murder. But she dared not know. She did not want to know. Justice would find out in time. She would not be in the secret if she could: and she thought with a strange pang of Miss Verney. That girl had been in the woods. She had said so. What had she seen? What did she know? Something had happened to blanch her cheeks, to redden her eyes, and give her the look of a hunted deer. What thing? At all events, Miss Verney's agitation and her confession—no, no, not that word in this connection!—her statement, rather, that she had been in the woods, made up a mysterious coincidence. If she had met her lover there—if it were