Page:Cuthbert Bede - The White Wife.djvu/33

14 with further sin by marrying another in preference to herself; nor can I tell whether she was drawn on that fatal road by some irresistible fascination that she was powerless to resist; nor can I tell whether, despairing of all hope in the success of her journey, she, in a moment of madness, plunged herself and her child into the cold waters of the little stream, wherein their dead bodies were found; or, whether she had over-reckoned her scant store of strength, and her limbs had failed her when she reached that spot, and so, in her fainting state, she fell down the bank, and was drowned; or whether, again, as others surmised, she had faltered in her path in the dim uncertain darkness of the early dawn, and had thus accidentally fallen into the stream. I cannot tell which, if any, of these conjectures and suppositions may be true; but this is all that is surely known for a fact, that the father awoke betimes in the morning, and found his daughter's bed deserted; that he tracked her footsteps through the hoar frost until he had come to a certain place on the bank of a stream that ran for some distance parallel to the highway; and that, just where it