“My horse is very restive. Suppose we ride on toward home, and I can explain as we go. There is no need of lingering here,” sighing heavily, “and my poor mother needs me by her side.”
He turned his horse’s head and cantered along by the side of the phaeton, while Amber exclaimed:
“Your mother is not ill, I hope!”
“Yes, she is ill—of grief and worry, and that terrible malady, an aching heart. She has received a terrible blow dealt by the pitiless hand of that heartless old man, Judge Camden.”
“You astonish me, my dear Cecil! What under Heaven could my grandfather do to distress your gentle mother?”
“He has done what no one could have dreamed of doing, for it was the act of a fiend, and must have been put into his head by the Evil One himself! Out of wrath and resentment against me, he has bought up the mortgage upon Bonnycastle, and foreclosed it. We are ordered to vacate the place in one week.”
“Good Heaven!”
Amber uttered that one cry and relapsed into silence, like one too dazed for further speech.
How often she had rehearsed this scene, how often laughed to herself at the tragic voice in which she would cry:
“Good Heaven!”