She was fast approaching the deep hollow where her mother died, and the terrible words that had dropped from Joe Barford, that it was haunted by her ghost, rushed into her mind, filling it with an ungovernable fear.
"What if she should see her apparition?" She stopped--irresolute what to do. Her own shadow in the moonlight made her start and scream. She tried to run past the spot, which lay in deep shadow to the right, but her feet seemed chained to the earth, and her eyes, as if under a terrible fascination, were fixed upon the clump of furze that crowned the little ridge above, that looked so black and shadowy when all around was bright as day.
While she stood, pale with horror, her eyes wide open, her quivering lips apart, the white teeth chattering together, and her limbs relaxed and trembling, a low wailing sound crept through the purple heath, the furze bushes shivered as if instinct with life, and the dog crawled to her feet moaning piteously.
Dorothy tried to rouse herself, to break, by speaking to the dog, the horrible spell in which her senses were bound up, but not a sound could she utter. In desperation she turned her head from the haunted spot.
She saw, what to her frenzied eye appeared a slight figure, shrouded in mist, through which the moon-beams flickered and played slowly, flitting along her path.
Again that wild unearthly sound rustled among the bushes, and the dog broke out into a long dismal howl. A cry, which heard, even at noon day, seldom fails to blanch the manliest cheek. Dorothy heard it not--with a sobbing moan she sank to the ground insensible to fear, or aught else beneath the wide canopy of heaven.
Pincher nestled close to his fainting mistress, hiding his shaggy head upon her breast.
Whatever the dog suffered through the lonely watches of the night, Dorothy was happily unconscious of his terrors and her own.
She was so near to her old home, that had her senses been roused from that death-like stupor, she might have heard the clock in the great hall strike twelve. At that beautiful season of the year, day brightens in the east before three o'clock, and the rosy tints in the west seldom leave the horizon.
The sun had just risen over the sea, when Lawrence Rushmere went to water his horses at the brook in the sandy lane that ran in front of the house, sheltered beneath the steep ascent of the heath. At the gate which led from the court-yard, he encountered Pincher, whom he had not seen since Dorothy left.