Book 7 - Chapter 1 - Page 2

expression of physical
pain still about her brow and eyes, and her whole appearance, with her
dress so long unchanged, was worn and distressed. She lifted the latch
of the gate and walked in slowly. Tom did not hear the gate; he was
just then close upon the roaring dam; but he presently turned, and
lifting up his eyes, saw the figure whose worn look and loneliness
seemed to him a confirmation of his worst conjectures. He paused,
trembling and white with disgust and indignation.

Maggie paused too, three yards before him. She felt the hatred in his
face, felt it rushing through her fibres; but she must speak.

"Tom," she began faintly, "I am come back to you,--I am come back
home--for refuge--to tell you everything."

"You will find no home with me," he answered, with tremulous rage.
"You have disgraced us all. You have disgraced my father's name. You
have been a curse to your best friends. You have been base, deceitful;
no motives are strong enough to restrain you. I wash my hands of you
forever. You don't belong to me."

Their mother had come to the door now. She stood paralyzed by the
double shock of seeing Maggie and hearing Tom's words.

"Tom," said Maggie, with more courage, "I am perhaps not so guilty as
you believe me to be. I never meant to give way to my feelings. I
struggled against them. I was carried too far in the boat to come back
on Tuesday. I came back as soon as I could."

"I can't believe in you any more," said Tom, gradually passing from
the tremulous excitement of the first moment to cold inflexibility.
"You have been carrying on a clandestine relation with Stephen
Guest,--as you did before with another. He went to see you at my aunt
Moss's; you walked alone with him in the lanes; you must have behaved
as no modest girl would have done to her cousin's lover, else that
could never have happened. The people at Luckreth saw you pass; you
passed all the other places; you knew what you were doing. You have
been using Philip Wakem as a screen to deceive Lucy,--the kindest
friend you ever had. Go and see the return you have made her. She's
ill; unable to speak. My mother can't go near her, lest she should
remind her of you."

Maggie was half stunned,--too heavily pressed upon by her anguish even
to discern any difference between her actual guilt and her brother's
accusations, still less to vindicate herself.

"Tom," she said, crushing her hands together under her cloak, in the
effort to speak again, "whatever I have done, I repent it bitterly. I
want to make amends. I will endure anything. I want to be kept from
doing wrong again."

"What _will_ keep you?" said Tom, with cruel bitterness. "Not
religion; not your natural feelings of gratitude and