Something must be done. Above all, it was necessary to stand in less familiar relations with her, to repress her, and lower her again to her old position of humble and despised servant-girl. The festival of Christmas was a good opportunity of paying her off with a loan, the handsomeness of which would discharge his obligations to her for all time. With a stroke of the pen he would provide for her future, and thereby purchase the right to regard her as what she actually was--his humble dependant and menial. She should give him her company to-day for the last time. She had not yet finished her evidence, and as he had once broken the ice he might as well know everything. Of those two awful nights of guilt and shame, in which she had been a witness of bloodshed and arson, he would hear the worst.
"And then when she has confessed all," he said to himself, "she shall keep to her green-house, which is her proper place, even if she has to burn all the timber in the park to prevent herself from freezing."
It was not seemly that in this solitude he should associate so much with her, and he made up his mind to put an end to the intimacy once for all.
A hare crossed his path and turned his thoughts into another channel. He aimed and hit it. The little animal rotated three times, and then lay motionless on its nose.
"She will be pleased," he thought, as he slung his booty over his shoulder. Ah! there he was thinking of her again already.
The sky meanwhile had clouded. A sharp shower of prickly white flakes cut through the trees; a wild hiss now mingled with the roar of the wind that made him shiver involuntarily in every limb. By aid of his compass he found the way home. When he entered the open fields the snow-storm was in full swing. He could scarcely stand against it. The air was dark with the falling masses of snow. There was not a trace visible of the shrubs in the park only three hundred feet away.
"It's to be hoped she's got home," he thought, as he struggled on.
Freshly fallen snow lay thick on the Cats' Bridge; there were no footprints in it, but they might easily have been obliterated.
With a sinking heart, he ran to the house and called her by name, but got no answer. The hearth was unswept, the fire out, the beds unmade as he had left them.