"The roads too are so bad! Had she lamps, Helen?"
"Oh yes. Some of the maids, while shutting up the rooms upstairs, saw the lights moving very rapidly towards the lodges."
"It is an inexplicable and very painful mystery. But go to bed, my dearest Helen! you look most wretchedly ill and miserable."
"Ill?—No, I am not ill, Charles, but miserable; yes, more miserable than I have ever felt since my poor father's death was first made known to me."
The following morning brought no relief to the anxiety which this strange absence occasioned. Rosalind joined the brother and sister at breakfast, and her jaded looks more than confirmed Helen's report of the preceding night. Charles, however, hardly saw her sufficiently to know how she looked, for he carefully avoided her eyes; but if the gentlest and most soothing tone of voice, and the expression of her almost tender sympathy in the uneasiness he was enduring, could have consoled the young man for all he had suffered and was suffering, he would have been consoled.
The day passed heavily; but Helen looked so very ill and so very unhappy, that Charles could not bear to leave her; and though a mutual feeling of embarrassment between himself and Rosalind made his remaining with them a very doubtful advantage, he never quitted them.
But it was quite in vain that he attempted to renew the occupations which had made the last six weeks pass so delightfully. He began to read; but Helen stopped him before the end of the page, by saying, "I cannot think what is the reason of it, Charles, but I cannot comprehend a single syllable of what you are reading."
Rosalind, blushing to the ears, and actually trembling from head to foot, invited him to play at chess with her. Without replying a word, he brought the table and set up the men before her; but the result of the game was, that Charles gave Rosalind checkmate, and it was Helen only who discovered it.
At an early hour they separated for the night; for the idea of waiting for Mrs. Mowbray seemed equally painful to them all, and the morrow's sun rose upon them only to bring a repetition of the sad and restless hours of the day that was past. Truly might they have said they were weary of conjecture; for so completely had they exhausted every supposition to which the imagination of either of the party could reach, without finding one on which common sense would permit them to repose, that, by what seemed common consent, they ceased to hazard a single "may be" more.
They were sitting with their coffee-cups before them, and Rosalind was once more trying to fix the attention of Charles, as well as her own, to the chess-board, when a lusty pull at the door-bell produced an alarm which caused all the servants in the house to jump from their seats, and one half of the chessmen to be overturned by the violent start of Rosalind.