And
the hour was nearly expired.
As it was he was far from pacified, and had nearly to be forced down
the steps as Purceville drew rein, and approached the door.
And when two more hours had passed, and he forced open the trap door
beneath the added weight and resistance of the carpet..... They were
gone. The house was dark and empty. Purceville had ridden ahead to
send a carriage back to meet them, as the two women he loved more than
his own life, advanced slowly north along the road to MacPherson
Castle.
Twenty
When the carriage at last arrived for them, looming up out of the fog
like a great floating skull, it was full Night, and the shadows had
again grown long across the young girl's heart.
Walking beside her like a wraith in the gloom, explaining to her the
`details' which she withheld from Michael, Anne Scott had seemed less
and less a loving guardian, more and more the whispering narrator of
the black comedy into which she had so suddenly returned, after a
brief and unreal respite of light and hope.
But of all the things the woman said, only one would take solid hold
in her mind, dimming and obscuring all others like the wreathing mists
that had engulfed her fated cousin upon the margins of Death's
Kingdom:
Her mother, who in her short-lived happiness she had all but
forgotten, had joined him there.
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