Every moment was an hour to her impatient heart until they should reach the minister’s and be made one ere Cecil learned that his fair young love, so cruelly torn away from him, was already widowed and had always been true to him at heart. Let but this knowledge reach him ere the marriage, and Amber knew that all her hopes would be overthrown.
It frightened her to think of the letter to Cecil lying hidden on her breast inside the folds of her warm sealskin jacket, and she determined to destroy it at the very first opportunity.
They were five miles on their way now, and they had come so fast that the gray pony was reeking with sweat in spite of the wintry cold. Cecil ventured to expostulate, but she turned on him with a white, reproachful face.
“One would think you were reluctant to reach Washington!” she exclaimed.
“You mistake me, dear Amber; but you will kill the poor animal if you keep up this rate of speed!”
For answer she touched the pony’s back with the whip, and the brave little animal flew forward like the wind, maintaining its high rate of speed for half a mile.
Then—perhaps from exhaustion, perhaps from some obstruction in the road—Cecil never knew which—an accident happened.
The brave pony stumbled and fell, and Cecil and Amber were both thrown violently out of the phaeton, on either side of the road into the soft white bed of snow with which Mother Nature was spreading the earth.
CHAPTER XLVII.
WAS SHE DEAD WITH ALL HER SINS UNREPENTED?
Cecil was very fortunate, for he rose uninjured from the ground, with the exception of a few bruises.