“My—dear—Olivia!” gasped Aunt Amelia.
But Olivia glided round to where her father sat, and stole her arms round his neck.
“Papa, you will not try and prevent me?” she said, in a strange voice, at once pleading and resolute.
“But—but you have been so ill, are still weak and unfit for the slightest excitement. How will you bear to see that poor fellow standing there, and being tried for his life? My dear, my dear, think!” and he stroked her hair with a trembling hand.
“I have thought, dear,” she said, quietly, laying her pale face against his. “I must go! I should die if I stayed at home to wait, wait, wait! Besides”—and her eyes flashed—“will not all his enemies be there—people who believe that he committed this wicked crime—and are only his friends to be absent?”
The squire kissed her and sighed.
“Have your own way, my dear. But I wish—I wish that Bartley were here!” he added, with a troubled frown. “I have heard nothing from him.”
She drew away from him suddenly, and without a word left the room.
All that night she lay awake, looking at the silent stars with hot, tearless eyes, thinking of Harold Faradeane in his narrow cell, waiting the verdict of life or death; and going over and over all the points of the strange mystery, which grew darker and more impenetrable the more she struggled to pierce it.
The morning broke with all the mature splendor of late summer; and as Bessie dressed her, she still thought of the man awaiting his fate, the man whose faith and honor she would have answered for with her life.