A dead silence. No sound to disturb the utter stillness, save the sighing of the early spring wind, the faint twitter of the birds among the budding branches as already they seek to tune their slender throats to the warblings of love, and the lowing of the brown-eyed oxen in the fields far, far below them.
Then Cyril says, with slow emphasis:
"I don't believe it. It's a lie! It is impossible!"
"It is true. I feel it so. Something told me my happiness was too great to last, and now it has come to an end. Alas! alas! how short a time it has continued with me! Oh, Cyril!"—smiting her hands together passionately,—"what shall I do? what shall I do? If he finds me he will kill me, as he often threatened. How shall I escape?"
"It is untrue," repeats Cyril, doggedly, hardly noting her terror and despair. His determined disbelief restores her to calmness.
"Do you think I would believe except on certain grounds?" she says. "Colonel Trant wrote me the evil tidings."
"Trant is interested; he might be glad to delay our marriage," he says, with a want of generosity unworthy of him.
"No, no, no. You wrong him. And how should he seek to delay a marriage that was yet far distant?"
"Not so very distant. I have yet to tell you"—with a strange smile—"my chief reason for being here to-day: to ask you to receive my mother to-morrow, who is coming to welcome you as a daughter. How well Fate planned this tragedy! to have our crowning misfortune fall straight into the lap of our newly-born content! Cecilia,"—vehemently,—"there must still be a grain of hope somewhere. Do not let us quite despair. I cannot so tamely accept the death to all life's joys that must follow on belief."
"You shall see for yourself," replies she, handing to him the letter that all this time has lain crumbled beneath her nerveless fingers.