Before the leaves had begun to fall in the dreary autumn days the
"Albatross" was ready for a new voyage. The first mate took her down to
Plymouth Harbour, there to wait the coming of her captain, who
travelled into Devonshire by mail-coach, taking Rosamond to her future
abode.
At any other time Rosamond would have been delighted with the romantic
beauty of that Devonian village, where her husband had selected a
pleasant cottage for her, near his aunt's abode; but a settled
melancholy had taken possession of the once joyous girl. She had
brooded continually over her husband's altered conduct, and she had at
last arrived at a terrible conclusion.
She believed that he was mad. What but sudden insanity could have
produced so great a change?--a change for which it was impossible to
imagine a cause.
"If he had been absent from me for some time, and had returned an
altered creature, I should not be so much bewildered by the change,"
Rosamond said to herself. "But the transformation occurred in an hour.
He saw no strange visitor; he received no letter. No tidings of any
kind could possibly have reached him. He entered my father's sitting-
room a light-hearted, happy man; he came out of it gloomy and
miserable. Can I doubt that the change is something more than any
ordinary alteration of feeling or character?"
Poor Rosamond remembered having heard of the fatal effects of
sunstrokes--effects which have sometimes revealed themselves long after
the occurrence of the calamity that caused them; and she told herself
that the change in George Jernam's nature must needs be the result of
such a calamity.
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