"Fear not, fear not," replied Helen: "my uncle will devise means to deliver you."
"Oh, let me fly, Helen," said Rose. "The door by which you came into the chapel, may give me freedom."
Helen shook her head: "Not to-night," she said. "You might meet him in the passages. As soon as he discovers you have left your room, there will be search and inquiry. We must trust to him who brought me hither: but Walter de la Tremblade is not a man to be frustrated by any one. Leave it to him--he will deliver you."
No sound as yet had reached them from the neighbouring chamber, although they had now quitted it nearly an hour; but the door was thick and heavy, and deeply sunk in the wall. The next moment, however, they heard voices speaking at the top of the stairs; and some one said aloud, "Goodnight, Monsieur de Chazeul!"
Those simple words were followed by a meaning laugh; then some other sounds not so distinct, and then all was silent again.
"You were right, dear Helen," said Rose d'Albret. "We should have been stopped had I attempted to fly. But where will this end?--where will this end?" and, turning her eyes to the pillow, she wept bitterly.
Helen tried to comfort her, though she herself needed consolation as much; for who can tell what were all the varied sensations, each painful, yet each different from the rest, which thronged her bosom on that sad night? She felt, oh, how bitterly! that she had loved a villain, deeper, blacker, more degraded than all his treachery to her could have taught her to believe; and there is no agony so horrible as when the cup of affection is first mingled with contempt and abhorrence. She was not only neglected and cast off for another,--that she could have borne, and wept or withered away in silence;--but she found him for whom she had sacrificed all, using still baser arts than those he had employed against herself, for sordid objects, and without even the excuse of passion. She felt grief too, for Rose d'Albret, for her who had been so tender and so kind towards herself; and dread, lest, after all, the machinations of those who had the poor girl in their toils, should prove successful, came like a cold dark cloud over the dreary prospect of the future.
All these emotions were added to her own shame and remorse and terrible disappointment; and, although Rose insisted that she should lie down beside her, yet neither closed an eye; and the rest of the night passed in long, though not uninterrupted, conversation. Often they listened for sounds, often they paused to meditate over all the painful circumstances that surrounded them; but still they turned to discuss, with faint and sinking hearts, either the gloomy past or the dark impenetrable time to come, which offered their eyes no tangible hope to rest upon, but in fresh sorrow, resistance and endurance.
With the first ray of light, Rose d'Albret returned to her own chamber, determined to follow to the least particular the advice of the priest: but Helen remained in her uncle's room, in expectation of his return. Minute after minute fled, however, without his coming. She heard Rose call her maid, and voices speaking; she heard the sounds of busy life spread through the château; she heard distant tones of a hunting horn swell up from the woody country beyond. But still her uncle did not appear; and Helen, in terror at the thought of new calamity, watched for him in vain.