It was not that new hopes were awakened, or that she doubted the result of her meeting with Hal. She knew instinctively it would lift her for the moment out of her despairing destitution, but it still rendered her future shadowy and undefined. She must accept pecuniary obligations from him. She shrank from them--needlessly enough--but her fears had by reflection been aroused, and her desperate situation had magnified them into unnatural proportions.
After all, her thoughts were of a very uncertain, half-formed character; she was too prostrated to think much. She had, with a mind worked up to a pitch of frenzy, stood upon the verge of eternity--a moment more, and she had precipitated herself into the obscure and misty regions of that unmapped land. She had been suddenly held back to renew the battle of life--upon what terms was hidden from her, but the revulsion of feeling occasioned by this recall overmastered all faculties but that of weeping, and left her, as we have stated, absorbed in tears.
Hal sought not to check them. It would be time enough to speak to her when the paroxysm had ceased, or at least abated somewhat of its violence. He hoped then for the return of better feelings; not that he intended to read her any homily upon the folly and the wickedness of the crime into the commission of which she was hurrying, because he believed that more powerful suggestions than any he could offer would present themselves to her, and because, also, from what little he knew of her nature, he felt fully convinced that the incitement to leap out of life into the dread unknown must have been of a description exceeding the sustaining powers of others gifted even with a higher capacity of endurance than she possessed.
So, for a considerable distance, they rode on in silence.
Her low-drawn sobs had grown gradually wider in the interval of their inspirations, and ultimately the painful sound ceased entirely. Having satisfied himself that she had not fainted, he made a few commonplace observations. Yet not altogether unconnected with the circumstances under which he had fallen in with her at a moment of such intense importance, in order to prove to her that it was a direct interposition of Providence in her behalf.