He got up and stood with his back to the fire, his pale troubled face in shadow.
“Don’t let me keep you up longer. You look pale and tired, poor soul!” he said, kindly; adding: “Can you give me a bed, or shall I go to the hotel?”
“I can give you a room,” she answered, lighting a bedroom-candle for him and leading the way to a cozy down-stairs chamber.
“Good-night. I hope you will sleep well,” she said, leaving him to ascend to her own quarters opposite Cinthia’s own little white-hung room that she took much pains in beautifying after her girlish fancies.
She peeped in at the girl and saw that she was wrapped in pleasant dreams, for the murmured name of Arthur passed her lips, and she smiled in joy beneath the gazer’s troubled eyes.
“Poor little girl—poor little girl!” she murmured, as she withdrew, her heart heavy with sympathy for the sweet love-dream so soon to be blighted by the father’s stern edict of separation.
“It is very, very, strange, the way Everard takes on about it. Why, he went wild just at the very name of Varian,” she said aloud to the large portrait of her long dead husband, Deacon Flint, good soul, that hung over her mantel. She had acquired a habit of talking absently to this portrait as if it were alive.
She read her short chapter in the Bible, mumbled over her prayer, and crept shivering into bed. But slumber was far from her eyes. The events of the evening had unstrung her nerves, and she lay awake, dreading the dawn of the morrow that was to usher in such disappointment and sorrow to the sleeping girl now dreaming so happily of the lover who was never to be her husband.
CHAPTER VI.
REBELLION.
Cinthia would have slept later than usual that morning but for her aunt’s hand gently shaking her as she said: