She laid her hand gently on my arm--
"Forgotten, Vere," she said; "that is not a kind or a generous speech. I shall never forget you. Always, always I shall think of you, pray for you. Papa knows best what is right. I will never disobey him: he has not forbidden us to see each other; we may be very happy still. Vere, you must be my brother."
"No more," I exclaimed, reproachfully, "no more?"
"No more, Vere," she answered, quite gently, but in a tone that admitted of no further appeal. "Brother and sister, Vere, for the rest of our lives; promise me this," and she put her soft hand in mine, and smiled upon me; pure and sorrowful, like an angel.
I was stung to madness by her seeming coldness, so different from my own wild, passionate misery.
"Be it so," I said; "and as brother and sister must part, so must you and I. Anything now for freedom and repose; anything to drive your image from my mind. I tell you that from henceforth I am a desperate man. Nobody cares for me on earth,--no father, no mother, none for whom to live; and the one I prized most discards me now. Constance, you never can have loved me as I have loved. Cold, heartless, false! I will never see you again."
She was quite bewildered by my vehemence. She looked round wildly at me, and her pale lip quivered, and her eyes filled with tears: even then I remained bitter and unmoved.
"Farewell," I said, "farewell, Constance, and for ever."
Her hand hung passively in mine, her "good-bye" seemed frozen on her lips; but she turned away with more than her usual majesty, and walked towards the house. I remarked that she dropped a white rose--fit emblem of her own dear self--on the gravel path, as she paced slowly along, without once turning her head. I was too proud to follow her and pick it up, but sprang away in an opposite direction, and was soon out of her sight.
That night, when the wild clouds were flying across the moon, and the wind howled through the gloomy yews and the ghostly fir-trees, and all was sad and dreary and desolate, I picked up the white rose from that gravel path, and placed it next my heart. Faded, shrunk, and withered, I have got it still. My home was now no place for me. I arranged my few affairs with small difficulty, pensioned the two old servants my poor father had committed to my charge; set my house in order, packed up my things, and in less than a week I was many hundred miles from Alton Grange and Constance Beverley.