There lay Mrs. Chester, the gentle, patient, long-suffering woman, stricken down, dying in her daughter’s arms.
Colonel Chester came to his senses at once, feeling all the horror and remorse of a murderer.
And Sinclair repented from his soul that he had not permitted himself to be expelled from the house with every species of ignominy rather than to have seen this.
That ashen brow—those fixed eyes—that silent tongue, and quick, gasping breath! that face of the dying! it would never depart from his memory. Oh! any personal indignity rather than this memory! if he could but save her! but she was beyond all help now, for—even as full of sorrow and remorse he gazed—with a long, deep sigh, as for the pilgrims she left behind on earth, her spirit passed to God.
Sinclair bore Alice, fainting, from the room.
Colonel Chester fell down on his knees, dropping his head upon the bed, and throwing his arms over his dead wife in a paroxysm of remorse and despair, ungovernable as his rage had been, and, alas! nearly as transient!
CHAPTER IV.
THE SUBJECTION OF ALICE.
Oh! bid me leap, rather than marry Paris,
From off the battlements of yonder tower.
—Shakspere.