“Oh, yes! she could! But she got facts and fancies so mixed up in her poor old brain that no one would dream of trusting to her stories. If you could ever have had the chance to see her, miss, you would have seen how very mad she was.”
Wynnette did not think it necessary to explain that she had seen Old Zillah and heard her story.
To no one could the girl breathe one word of her terrible night in the old castle. Sometimes she was half inclined to believe that she had really fallen asleep on the window sill and dreamed it all—from the moment of horror and amazement when the spectral eyes lighted up the loopholes of the old wall, to the moment when she was awakened by the voice of her sister.
Wynnette was more bewildered than she liked to own herself to be—bewildered as to the dream, or the reality of her terrible night! Bewildered as to the relative truth or falsehood of the two conflicting stories she had heard of the beautiful peasant girl’s fate.
“What is dream and what is reality? What is fact and what is fable?” she asked herself continually.
CHAPTER XLIX
BROTHER AND SISTER
Meanwhile there was another member of the family circle fully as much perplexed as was Wynnette, though upon another subject.
The Earl of Enderby could not reconcile all his knowledge—his lifelong knowledge of Angus Anglesea, his schoolmate at Harrow; his classmate at Oxford, his brother-in-arms in India, the brave, tender, faithful friend and comrade of many years and many lands—with this thief, forger, bigamist, described under his name by Elfrida Force and all her family.
“Elf,” he said to her one day, as the two sat tête-à-tête in the library—all the other members of the family circle having gone out for a stroll on the top of the cliffs—“Elf, my dear, I have had some trials in my time—not the least among them, my inherited malady, dooming me to an early death and barring me from marriage——”
“Oh, Francis, don’t say that! Medical science has reached such perfection, you may be restored to health; and you are yet not middle-aged—you may marry and be happy,” said the lady, almost in tears.