"They lied!" returns Cyril, passionately, losing his head. "You may tell them so for me. And you,"—half choking,—"you lie too when you repeat such vile slanders."
"It is useless to argue with you," Guy says, coldly, the blood mounting hotly to his forehead at Cyril's insulting words, while his expression grows stern and impenetrable. "I waste time. Yet this last word I will say: Go down to The Cottage—now—this moment—and convince yourself of the truth of what I have said."
He turns angrily away: while Cyril, half mad with indignation and unacknowledged fear, follows this final piece of advice, and almost unconsciously leaving the house, takes the wonted direction, and hardly draws breath until the trim hedges and pretty rustic gates of The Cottage are in view.
The day is showery, threatening since dawn, and now the rain is falling thickly, though he heeds it not at all.
As with laggard steps he draws still nearer the abode of her he loves yet does not wholly trust, the sound of voices smites upon his ear. He is standing upon the very spot—somewhat elevated—that overlooks the arbor where so long ago Miss Beauchamp stood and learned his acquaintance with Mrs. Arlington. Here now he too stays his steps and gazes spell-bound upon what he sees before him.
In the arbor, with his back turned to Cyril, is a man, tall, elderly, with an iron-gray moustache. Though not strictly handsome, he has a fine and very military bearing, and a figure quite unmistakable to one who knows him: with a sickly chill at his heart, Cyril acknowledges him to be Colonel Trant.
Cecilia is beside him. She is weeping bitterly, but quietly, and with one hand conceals her face with her handkerchief. The other is fast imprisoned in both of Trant's.
A film settles upon Cyril's eyes, a dull faintness overpowers him, involuntarily he places one hand upon the trunk of a near elm to steady himself; yet through the semi-darkness, the strange, unreal feeling that possesses him, the voices still reach him cruelly distinct.
"Do not grieve so terribly: it breaks my heart to see you, darling, darling," says Trant, in a low, impassioned tone, and raising the hand he holds, presses his lips to it tenderly. The slender white fingers tremble perceptibly under the caress, and then Cecilia says, in a voice hardly audible through her tears: