These words, from the lips of her mother, were more than Marcella could bear; she gasped and fell into her arms.
When the Marquis returned from his successful mission to Rome, he found his sister dead; and his wife in possession of his daughter's unlimited confidence; but that timid and self-accusing daughter, was brought to the verge of the grave by sorrow for the deceased, and shame at the weakness of her heart.
His first communication to the Marchioness was to prepare her family for crossing with him to England.
"I have given my sanction to Ferdinand's attachment to the niece of Mr. Athelstone;" said he, "travelling and change of scene will be beneficial to Marcella; and our friends of Lindisfarne will give us the welcome of kindred."
Marcella obeyed the commands of her father in these preparations: and perhaps the more readily, since her mother's irrepressible and constant representations of Louis's demonstrations of a peculiar sentiment for her, had in spite of her own prepossessions to the contrary, and what she would not acknowledge to herself, given her an idea of the possibility of what her mother believed, being true. In urging these sometimes visionary arguments, the Marchioness at last said to her.
"Should you and the Marquis de Montemar meet as I expect, it is not probable that your father would be more inexorable to his daughter and best loved friend, than he has proved himself to Ferdinand and Alice Coningsby!"
"If I go to England," returned Marcella, and she believed she spoke the truth, "I will never meet the Marquis de Montemar at all, if you, my dear mother, are to draw any conclusions from that, that I expect, or even wish him to consider me in any other light than as a professed nun. That sin of my imagination is now over: I shall see my father's friend with the confidence of a sister. But no more."
If the Marchioness thought otherwise, she did not express it; and Marcella was not again persecuted on the subject.
Being in England; and learning from her mother, (who glided out of the room with the information;) that the preserver of her father and her brother, was then in the house; she did not deny the next request, that she would obey her father's wish in joining the party in the drawing-room. She felt confident in her own resolves; and with a serene aspect, put her arm on her mother's to comply.
She was in black.—It was the first time Louis had seen her out of the dress of a nun; and, on her entrance, he started with an emotion that surprized him, at so unexpected a change.