"I tried to do my duty to Miss Marchmont as well as to my mistress," she said. "I waited on her faithfully while she was ill. I sat up with her six nights running; I didn't take my clothes off for a week. There are folks in the house who can tell you as much."
"God knows I am grateful to you, and will reward you for any pity you may have shown my poor darling," the young man answered, in a more subdued tone; "only, if you pity me, and wish to help me, speak out, and speak plainly. What do you think has become of my lost girl?"
"I cannot tell you, sir. As God looks down upon me and judges me, I declare to you that I know no more than you know. But I think––––"
"You think what?"
"That you will never see Miss Marchmont again."
Edward Arundel started as violently as if, of all sentences, this was the last he had expected to hear pronounced. His sanguine temperament, fresh in its vigorous and untainted youth, could not grasp the thought of despair. He could be mad with passionate anger against the obstacles that separated him from his wife; but he could not believe those obstacles to be insurmountable. He could not doubt the power of his own devotion and courage to bring him back his lost love.
"Never––see her––again!"
He repeated these words as if they had belonged to a strange language, and he were trying to make out their meaning.
"You think," he gasped hoarsely, after a long pause,––"you think––that––she is––dead?"
"I think that she went out of this house in a desperate state of mind. She was seen––not by me, for I should have thought it my duty to stop her if I had seen her so––she was seen by one of the servants crying and sobbing awfully as she went away upon that last afternoon."