Flora swept past him, as if unwilling to interrupt his instructions to the servant, and vanished in the darkness. But Kitty went into the kitchen to take leave of the widow. The old lady gravely shook her head when she found that Flora had actually left the house without even bidding her good-night, but she said nothing, and followed the doctor into the sickroom to see the invalid once more before retiring to her own apartment.
Flora waited just outside of the house until the servant’s footsteps had died away on the other side of the bridge. The light from the open hall-door feebly illumined her angry face: it looked as if a curse were hovering upon the parted lips. With an air of unspeakable contempt her gaze rested upon the old house, marking the red tiled floor and bare walls of the hall, and the entire exterior of the dwelling, as if to make of the whole a complete picture in her mind.
"Oh, yes; greatly to my taste all this would have been,—a cottage with the man of my choice!’" she said, with intense sarcasm, slowly nodding her head: "a husband without position or influence! a dreary old barn for a home in the midst of a lonely field! and an isolated existence for the means of which my own limited income must suffice! I have never known before what humiliation was. To-day, for the first time, in the midst of those sordid surroundings, I felt dragged down, as it were, from the pedestal where spotless descent, easy circumstances, and the possession of intellectual force have placed me. God grant that Henriette’s illness may not terminate fatally! I could not bid her a last farewell, for this house shall never again see me within its walls. Never was woman more shamefully deluded than I have been; I could rage against myself for having been so blindly and unsuspectingly lured into such a snare."
She turned and hurried towards the bridge. The moonlight, gleaming like a thin silvery veil upon the water, shed its pale rays upon her; the wind, already rising, fluttered her dress and, tearing the shiny silken covering from her head, tossed up the light ringlets in snaky curls above her white brow.
"He does not release me, in spite of my prayers and struggles," she said, pausing in the middle of the bridge, to her sister, who had followed her, and now would have passed her without a word. "You were there; you heard what was said. He is acting without honour, without pity, like some usurer, who has failed to degrade his victim but yet insists upon the fulfilment of the bargain made between them. Let him content himself with the shadow of justice he boasts on his side. From this moment I am free!"