The last fatal word was uttered with a distinctness awful to the unfortunate listener. For a burning moment he still knelt as though he heard not; he scarce seemed to draw his breath; an air of speechless anguish clouded his dark eye; and then, as if all at once he realized his wayward fate, he smote his hands together, and while the veins swelled almost to bursting on his brow, exclaimed, in a voice of agony Ellen could never forget:
"Oh God, help me!—I am truly most miserable."
Then, springing up, he rushed from the room without one farewell word. When he was gone, Ellen seemed first to breathe; she buried her face in her hands, and sobs of woe, wrung from a full heart, showed how deeply she felt her old lover's misery, and how keenly another's woe touched her tender spirit.
CHAPTER XV.
"The stately homes of England
How beautiful they stand,
Amidst their tall ancestral trees,
O'er all the pleasant land!
The deer across the greensward bound
Through shade and sunny gleam,
And the swan glides past them with the sound
Of some rejoicing stream."—Hemans.
"Look, Nelly, see the deer!" cried little Maude Ravensworth, as their carriage slowly climbed the gentle ascent leading from the foot of the park to the Towers; "see them—one, two, three—bounding across the road."
"Yes, love; the park is full of them; look, Maude, there are five stags beneath that oak-tree," said her sister Ellen.
"What a shot that fellow with the tall antlers is!" said Johnny, leaning back from the box on which he sat, beside the coachman.
"I marvel how any one has the heart to shoot a stag," said his father. "To me it seems little short of murder. I can understand hunting the fox, the wolf, or baiting the badger; but to kill deer, so innocent, so harmless, seems quite cruel."