The sorceress made no reply; but, turning her face towards the path that led to the seashore, she rapidly traversed the lawn, and, waving her hand warningly, disappeared down the path leading to the beach.
The cause to which her father attributed her sudden and unwonted grief greatly relieved Kate; and by allowing him, through her silence, to retain the impression he had formed, she was saved the embarrassment of making him a confidant of her wounded affections by unfolding to him the true cause—a task, in her present state of mind, impossible for her to perform, and one which, at any time, would have been a sad trial to her maidenly sensitiveness. In a few moments she became more composed: the tide of her affections, which had been forced back upon the fountain-head, having found a channel in paternal love through which to flow, if not in the same direction as before, yet nearly in as deep and strong a current.
She accompanied him to the castle, and for the remainder of the morning was so occupied in forwarding the preparations for his departure and that of her cousin, that she had little time to devote to her own peculiar sorrows, leaving them for the lonely hours that would find her, after they were gone, in the solitary chamber, mourning over her crushed and blighted love. Yet a faint ray of the light of hope shone through the darkness of her heart, and the faintly-cherished belief that the tale of the sorceress might be false kept her from abandoning herself to that hopelessness of grief, shame and utter wretchedness into which she would have sunk had the truth been made manifest to her, divested of every shadow of doubt.
END OF VOL. I.
NEW AND IMPORTANT WORKS LATELY PUBLISHED
BY HARPER & BROTHERS.
THE PRIVATE JOURNAL OF AARON BURR
During his Residence of four Years in Europe; with Selections from his Correspondence.
Edited by Matthew L. Davis, Author of "Memoirs of Aaron Burr," &c.