"I am yours, &c.
"LAMORNA.
"A copy kept."
"How dare this Lord Lamorna write to you thus, mamma?" asked Sybil, her dark eyes flashing with unusual light; but the pale mother answered only with her tears, and recalling now certain broken sentences which had escaped her—sentences that seemed somewhat to correspond painfully with the insulting tenor of the letter. Sybil, after the first hours of excessive grief were past, said in a composed voice, yet with tremulous lips,
"What does Lord Lamorna mean? Who are we, mamma? and what are we?"
Constance was silent, though each pulsation of her heart was a veritable pang.
"Are we not Devereaux?"
"No."
"Who then?" urged Sybil, her pallor increasing while the silence or pause that ensued was painful to both; to none more than the innocent mother, the guarded secret of whose blameless life was now about to be laid bare before her own child—a secret that seemed now to assume the magnitude of a crime! All the care, doubt, anxiety, and mystery of the past years had gone for nothing, and the sacrifice she had made of herself, was now likely to recoil fearfully upon her, and more than all upon her children.
In broken accents, with her aching head reclined on Sybil's breast, she told all that the reader already knows; the insane pride of birth and family which inspired the old lord, his suspicions and threats, the long necessity for consequent secrecy; and Sybil heard all this strange story with intense bewilderment.
Could she realise it—take it all into her comprehension? Her mother was a lady of title—her brother Denzil was the real Lord Lamorna, she herself was not a Devereaux, but a Trevelyan like Audley—and he, Audley, who loved her so, was her own cousin!