Mrs. Arnold shrieked aloud and went into horrible hysterics, laughing wildly and maniacally, and tearing her hair from its fastenings; but Felise Herbert stood still as a statue of horror, looking at the dismal scene. Her pale face was paler than ever, and her large, black eyes looked wildly about her. She made no effort to arrest her mother's frenzied cries, but stood still as if frozen into ice, while the maids lifted up the still form of poor Bonnibel and carried her through the drawing-room window, laying her down gently, and applying restoratives.
Life came swiftly back to her under their influence. She lifted her head, and opened her eyes upon the faces around her just as a shrill and piercing whistle announced the departure of the train which was bearing her young husband away from her for years—perhaps forever.
Bonnibel sprang up and went out on the piazza again. As she stepped to the side of that lifeless form, Felise Herbert, just waking from her apparent trance of horror, waved her hands in the air, and cried out solemnly and sepulchrally:
"Oh, Heaven! It is Leslie Dane who has done this dreadful deed. That was what he meant by his dark threats this evening!"
"Leslie Dane has killed him!" echoed her mother, wildly.
"It is false, woman! How dare you accuse him of such a deed?" Bonnibel cried out fiercely, wild with grief and horror; then suddenly she looked at the half-dazed men-servants standing around their master helplessly.
"Idiots!" she cried, "why do you stand here idle? Why does not some one bring a doctor? Perhaps he is not dead yet—he may be revived."
They brought a physician at her bidding, but when he came his services were needed for her, not for the pale corpse down stairs that would nevermore want the physician's potent art. They had taken her by force to her room, where she was wildly walking the floor, wringing her hands and raving over her loss.
"You are dead, Uncle Francis," she cried, passionately; "you will never speak to me again. And I had left you in anger. We never quarreled before—never! And without a good-bye kiss, without a forgiving word, you are gone from me into the darkness of death! They have killed you, my dear one!—who could have been so cruel?—and you will never know how I loved you, and that I forgave you for your cruelty so soon, or that I wished to be reconciled. Oh, God! Oh, God!"
She told her story frankly to the good old doctor when he came and questioned her. She and her uncle had quarreled because he had denied her a darling wish. She had rushed out of the house in a fit of anger, and moped about the seashore until late into the night. Then she had returned, and seeing him sitting there on the piazza she had felt her anger melting into tenderness, and stolen up to give him the kiss of reconciliation, but found him cold and dead.