Page:Salem - a tale of the seventeenth century (IA taleseventeenth00derbrich).pdf/233

 Browne, the next day, although she was in reality ill from the effects of her midnight terror, made an effort to rise and appear at the early breakfast-table as usual; but her husband did not tell her that the morning's light had revealed to him that the flowering vines around the porch, beneath the window she had found open, were slightly but discernibly broken, trampled, and crushed, as if an expert climber had ascended and descended by that means; for he feared such a confirmation of her story would only lend a new intensity to her belief; and he fondly hoped that time and change—absence from the terrible scenes around her, and the charms and incidents of foreign travel, to which they were looking forward—would obliterate it from her mind. But in this hope he was mistaken; the conviction was far too firmly rooted, and she brooded over it in fearful silence day and night.

Although in advance of her times in regard to the subject of witchcraft, and looking with scorn and horror upon the mad fanaticism of the multitude around her, she was not, of course, wholly superior to the almost