Reflecting upon these terrible outbursts of the family passion, Lyon Berners became very much alarmed for Sybil.
He started up and went in search of her. He looked successively through the drawing-room, the dining-room, and library. Not finding her in any of these rooms, he ascended to the second floor and sought her in their own apartment. Still not finding her, his alarm became agony.
“I will search every square yard within these walls,” he said, as he hurried through all the empty chambers of that floor, and then went up into the attic.
There, in the lumber-room—the chamber of desolation—he found his wife, lying with her face downwards on the floor. He hastened towards her, fearing that she was in a swoon. But no; she was only exhausted by the violence of her emotions.
Without saying a word, he lifted her in his arms as if she had been a child. She was too faint now to resist him. He carried her down stairs to her own chamber and laid her on the sofa, and while he gently smoothed the damp dark hair from her pale brow, he whispered softly:
“My wife, I know now what has troubled you. It was a great error, my own dear Sybil. You have no cause to doubt me, or to distress yourself.”
She did not reply, but with a tearless sob, turned her face to the wall.
“It was of you that I was thinking, my beloved, when I wrote that name on the cards,” he continued, as he still smoothed her hair with his light mesmeric touch. She did not repel his caresses, but neither did she reply to his words. And he saw, by the heaving of her bosom and the quivering of her lips, that the storm had not yet subsided.
He essayed once more to reassure her.
“Dear wife,” he earnestly commenced, “you believe that my affections are inconstant, and that they have wandered from you?”