"Charles," he said, "Ellen is gone!"
Charles said "Where?" for he hardly understood him.
"Where? God knows! She must have left the house soon after you saw her last night. She left this note for me. Take it and read it. You see I am free from blame in this matter."
Charles took it and read it.
"My Lord,
"I should have consented to accept the shelter of your roof for a longer period, were it not that, by doing so, I should be continually tempted to the commission of a dishonourable action—an action which would bring speedy punishment on myself, by ruining too surely the man whom, of all others in the world, I love and respect.
"Lieutenant Hornby has proposed marriage to me. Your lordship's fine sense of honour will show you at once how impossible it is for me to consent to ruin his prospects by a union with such a one as myself. Distrusting my own resolution, I have fled, and henceforth I am dead to him and to you.
"Ah! Welter, Welter! you yourself might have been loved as he is, once; but that time is gone by for ever. I should have made you a better wife than Adelaide. I might have loved you myself once, but I fell more through anger and vanity than through love.
"My brother, he whom we call Charles Ravenshoe, is in this weary world somewhere. I have an idea that you will meet him. You used to love one another. Don't let him quarrel with you for such a worthless straw as I am. Tell him I always loved him as a brother. It is better that we should not meet yet. Tell him that he must make his own place in the world before we meet, and then I have something to say to him.
"Mary, the Mother of God, and the blessed saints before the throne, bless you and him, here and hereafter!"
Charles had nothing to say to Lord Welter, not one word. He saw that the letter was genuine. He understood that Welter had had no time to tell her of his coming, and that she was gone; neither Welter nor he knew where, or were likely to know; that was all. He only bid him good-bye, and walked home again.
When you know the whole story, you will think that Charles's run of ill luck at this time is almost incredible; but I shall call you to witness that it is not so. This was the first stroke of real ill luck that he had had. All his other misfortunes came from his mad determination of alienating himself from all his friends. If he had even left Lord Welter free to have mentioned that he had been seen, all might have gone well, but he made him promise secrecy; and now, after having, so to speak, made ill luck for himself, and lamented over it, here was a real stroke of it with a vengeance, and he did not know it. He was not anxious about Ellen's future; he felt sure at once that she was going into some Roman Catholic refuge, where she would be quiet and happy. In fact, with a new fancy he had in his head, he was almost content to have missed her. And Ellen, meanwhile, never dreamt either of his position or state of mind, or she would have searched him out at the end of the world. She thought he was just as he always had been, or, perhaps, turning his attention to some useful career with Cuthbert's assistance; and she thought she would wait, and wait she did; and they went apart, not to meet till the valley of the shadow of death had been passed, and life was not so well worth having as it had been.
But as for our old friend Father Mackworth. As I said once before, "It's no use wondering, but I do wonder," whether Father Mackworth, had he known how near Ellen and Charles had been to meeting the night before, would not have whistled "Lillibulero," as Uncle Toby did in times of dismay; that is, if he had known the tune.