For a while Miss Wimple remained standing on the spot, gazing anxiously, but vacantly, toward the door by which the half-mad lady had departed,--her soft, deep eyes full of painful apprehension. Then she resumed her little rocking-chair, and, as she gathered up her work from the floor where she had dropped it, tears trickled down her cheeks; she sighed and shook her head, in utter sorrow.
"They were always strange women," she thought, "those Splurges,--not a sound heart nor a healthy mind among them. Could their false, barren life have maddened this proud Madeline? Else what did she mean by her 'hot head' and her 'fierce heart'? And what had that Philip Withers to do with her trouble and her distraction? She recollected now that Simon had once said, in his odd, significant way, that Mr. Withers was a charming person to contemplate from a safe distance,--Simon, who never lent himself to idle detraction. She remembered, too, that she had often reproached herself for her irrational prejudice against the man,--that she was forever finding something false and sinister in the face that every one else said was eminently handsome, and ugly dissonance in the voice that all Hendrik praised for its music. Was he on both sides of that card?--Ah, well! it might be just nothing, after all; the poor lady might be ill, or vexed past endurance at home; or some unhappy love affair might have come to fret her proud, impatient, defiant temper. But not Withers,--oh, of course not Withers!--for was it not well known that Adelaide was his choice, that his assiduous and graceful attentions to her silenced even his loudest enemies, who could no longer accuse him of duplicity and disloyalty to women? But she would feel less disturbed, and sleep better, perhaps, if she knew that Madeline was safe at home, and tranquil again."
Thinking of sleep reminded Miss Wimple that she had a pious task to perform before she could betake her to her sweet little cot. A superannuated and bedridden woman, who had nursed her mother in her last illness, lived on the northern outskirts of the town; and she must cross the long covered bridge that spanned the Hendrik River to take a basket full of comforting trifles to old Hetty that night.