The name he used recalled her to herself, and the peculiarity of her position as regarded him—the secret she could not yet reveal; and turning away as an expression of confusion come over her face, she stooped, and casting her arms round the great Thibet mastiff, caressed it with a grace and playfulness that partook of girlish glee.
By this time Sybil was reclining wearily, and with an air of utter exhaustion and languor, on a sofa. Her face was very pale, save when a kind of hectic flush passed over it, and her eyes seemed unnaturally bright. Even to the unpractised observation of the two gentlemen it was evident that they had better retire, and, after exchanging a glance suggestive of this, they both rose, hat in hand.
"You will, I hope, permit me to call to-morrow and make inquiries?" said Audley Trevelyan.
Constance bowed, and her tongue trembled: what she said she scarcely knew, but it was a muttered wish of some kind, with many thanks and reference to her husband's return, all oddly combined. That she laboured under some species of hidden restraint was quite apparent to the perception of him she addressed, and also to the General; and so, after the usual well-bred wishes that both ladies should soon recover from the effects of their recent terror, they withdrew together; and as the sound of their carriage wheels died away in the willow avenue, all other sounds, and the light too, seemed to pass away from Sybil, as she sank gradually back, became insensible, and was conveyed to bed by Winny Braddon and her startled mother, who summoned medical aid without delay.
The next day found her in a species of nervous fever. She had undergone too much of mental fear and bodily suffering for a nature so delicate as hers, and remained for a time unconscious of all around her. Slowly and gradually, like water filtering through a rock—as some one describes the struggles of returning sensibility—she became aware that she was in her own bed, with her mother on one side and Winny Braddon on the other in watchful attendance; then, with a shudder, she would recall the horrors she had escaped, and clasp her hands as she had done ten years before, when a little child in prayer.
Then exhaustion would bring sleep, but a sleep haunted by dreams, and, at times, visions wild as those of an opium-eater; thus, for many a night, long after this period, the episodes of that eventful evening would come back to memory with all their harrowing details: the advancing tide rolling against the impending cliffs and thundering in the Pixies' Hole, after it had swallowed the drenched sand; her retreating step by step fearfully and breathlessly before it, in terror of being drowned on one hand and of falling down the mine on the other!
Anon, she would imagine herself swung up that terrible shaft through darkness and space, and that the rope was just on the eve of parting, when she would wake with a half-stifled scream to find that she was in the arms of her mamma, who was soothing and caressing her.
CHAPTER XVII.
THE TRECARRELS.
Duly next day, at a proper visiting-hour, the handsome and well-appointed carriage of General Trecarrel, occupied only by his two daughters and Audley Trevelyan, was seen bowling down the avenue of the villa at Porthellick, with Rajah bounding before it in as much glee as if at home in Thibet, "the northern land of snow," where many a time he had scoured along the slopes of the Himalaya range and the Dwalaghiri in pursuit of the Cashmere goat and the Tartarian yak; but, as the event proved, the visit was in vain: the two ladies could only leave their cards, as they were informed that both Mrs. and Miss Devereaux were too much indisposed after the events of yesterday to receive visitors.