She now felt herself much disturbed, and experienced that state of mind
which is often occasioned by the enunciation of that which is known
to be truth, but which, at the same time, is productive of pain to the
conscience, especially when that conscience begins to abandon the field
and fly from its duty.
Woodward, as he had intended, preferred the open and common road home,
although it was much longer, rather than return by the old green
lane, which was rugged and uneven, and full of deep ruts, dangerous
inequalities, and stumps of old trees, all of which rendered it not only
a disagreeable, but a dangerous, path by night. Having got out upon
the highway, which here, and until he reached near home, was, indeed,
solemn-looking and lonely, not a habitation except the haunted house
being visible for upwards of two miles, he proceeded on his way,
thinking of his interview with Grace Davoren. The country on each side
of him was nearly a desert; a gray ruin, some of whose standing and
isolated fragments assumed, to the excited imagination of the terrified
peasants as they passed it by night, the appearance of supernatural
beings, stood to the left, in the centre of an antiquated church-yard,
in which there had not been a corpse buried for nearly half a century--a
circumstance which always invests a graveyard with a more fearful
character.
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