"Not Launce, father! Don't tell me that it is Launce!"
"Heaven only knows! It was some one who was coming from that hateful Rose Mount; and, let Launce go east or west, he ends there before the day is out."
She knows it is too true; and suddenly her composure gives way, her strength with it, and, throwing her arms about her father's neck, she bursts into tears.
Very drearily the hours pass to the old man and the girl waiting and listening in the large lonely house.
It is twelve o'clock before Horace comes home. He has seen nothing of his brother since they met for lunch at the colonel's. He would ride off then and there to make inquiries if his father would let him; but the squire will not hear of such a thing. He sends them to their own rooms, and sees to the fastening of doors and windows—a thing Honor has never known him to do in all his life before—and then he sits down in the large empty dining-room—the scene of many a jovial feast—to wait for the morning light, and the news that must come with it!
But this is fated to be a night long remembered at Donaghmore. All her life long Honor will look back upon it with dread—will remember the deep anxiety, amounting to despair, that makes its black hours as they creep by seem like days in ordinary life.
It is a moonless night, and the wind, which has risen to a gale, fills the air with noises—the rattling of loosely-fastened shutters, the sough of the pine trees behind the house, the thousand-and-one eerie sounds that a high wind and night bring into empty rooms and corridors.
It is useless to go to bed—she could not sleep. Even if there was no storm, the horrible doubt—which grows less a doubt every hour—that the man who has met his death on Keif Moss is her brother Launce would be enough to banish sleep from her eyes.
And then Aileen's dream of the grave cut deep in the moss, and hidden from sight by green branches—it all comes back vividly now, and adds to the girl's torture. She has no longer the strength to scoff at these things. And, if that was a warning of the death that was lying in wait for her darling, then the other dream of the grave out there on the lawn, in view of their own windows, might not that come true?
As the thought occurs to her, she draws back the curtains and looks out. It is too dark to see anything, and she is turning away, when the glimmer of a light in the direction of the old ruins makes her start and pause.