'I made you a promise, Rachel,' said her beautiful cousin, gravely, and a little coldly and sadly, too; 'I will never break it again—it was thoughtless. Let us each try to forget that there is anything hidden between us.'
'If ever the time comes, dear Dorcas, when I may tell it to you, I don't know whether you will bless or hate me for having kept it so well; at all events, I think you'll pity me, and at last understand your miserable cousin.'
'I said before, Rachel, that I liked you. You are one of us, Rachel. You are beautiful, wayward, and daring, and one way or another, misfortune always waylays us; and I have, I know it, calamity before me. Death comes to other women in its accustomed way; but we have a double death. There is not a beautiful portrait in Brandon that has not a sad and true story. Early death of the frail and fair tenement of clay—but a still earlier death of happiness. Come, Rachel, shall we escape from the spell and the destiny into solitude? What do you think of my old plan of the valleys and lakes of Wales? a pretty foreign tongue spoken round us, and no one but ourselves to commune with, and books, and music. It is not, Radie, altogether jest. I sometimes yearn for it, as they say foreign girls do for convent life.'
'Poor Dorcas,' said Rachel, very softly, fixing her eyes upon her with a look of inexpressible sadness and pity.
'Rachel,' said Dorcas, 'I am a changeable being—violent, self-willed. My fate may be quite a different one from that which I suppose or you imagine. I may yet have to retract my secret.'
'Oh! would it were so—would to Heaven it were so.'
'Suppose, Rachel, that I had been deceiving you—perhaps deceiving myself—time will show.'
There was a wild smile on beautiful Dorcas's face as she said this, which faded soon into the proud serenity that was its usual character.
'Oh! Dorcas, if your good angel is near, listen to his warnings.'
'We have no good angels, my poor Rachel: what modern necromancers, conversing with tables, call "mocking spirits," have always usurped their place with us: singing in our drowsy ears, like Ariel—visiting our reveries like angels of light—being really our evil genii—ah, yes!'