“He sent you to tell me this? Why was he not brave enough to come himself?”
“He believed it was better not to see you again,” the lady answered; and Cinthia gasped in a sort of terror.
Not to see him again—her Arthur, her love, her king, who was just now to have been her happy bridegroom! Why, this was too terrible to believe! Parted in an hour, torn asunder at the altar by the cruelty of those cold hearts that age and time had taught forgetfulness of love. Why, this was too hard to bear!
It seemed to her that she was swooning, dying; the same sick feeling came to her that she had felt last night, when her father’s voice shouted to them in the blackness of the night; but a sudden hope, a lightning suspicion, restored her fainting senses, and she sat erect again.
“I—I—” she began incoherently. “Oh, Mrs. Varian, it would break my heart to believe the cruel thing you have just said! My Arthur—mine—who was to be my husband—to turn against me all in one moment, to wish never to see me again! You are deceiving me. I will not believe such an impossible story save from his own lips.”
With that passionate defiance she lay back pale and panting, gazing with half-shut eyes at her tormentor.
“Is it so?” said Mrs. Varian. “Then you shall be satisfied. It was only to spare you and Arthur pain. But perhaps it will please you to hear that he suffers as much as you do over this pang of parting.”
There came to her the first intimation of an unsuspected nobility in the girl’s nature when Cinthia uttered, drearily:
“It would be cruel—nay, wicked—in me to wish any one to feel the agony of soul that is my portion.”
“Yet Arthur shares it with you, child, to the deepest, bitterest dregs. Come with me, and see.”