At the moment when, standing spell-bound in the shadow, she had seen Manisty stooping over the unconscious Lucy, and had heard his tender breathless words, the sword had fallen, dividing the very roots of being.
And now--strange irony!--the only heart on which she leant, the only hand to which she clung, were the heart and the hand of Lucy! 'Why, why are we here ?' she cried to herself with a sudden change of position and of anguish.
Was not their flight a mere absurdity ?--humiliation for herself, since it revealed what no woman should reveal--but useless, ridiculous as any check on Manisty! Would he give up Lucy because she might succeed in hiding her for a few weeks?
Was that passionate will likely to resign itself to the momentary defeat she had inflicted on it?
Supposing she succeeded in despatching Lucy to America without any further interview between them; are there no steamers and trains to take impatient lovers to their goal?
What childish folly was the whole proceeding! And would she even succeed so far?
Might he not even now be on their track?
How possible that he should remember this place--its isolation--and her pleasure in it! She started in her chair.

It seemed to her that she already heard his feet upon the road.
Then her thought rebounded in a fierce triumph, an exultation that shook the feeble frame.

She was secure! She was entrenched, so to speak, in Lucy's heart.

Never would that nature grasp its own joy at the cost of another's agony.

No! no!--she is not in love with him!--the poor hurrying brain insisted.