"He has gone to tell Miss Neville he loves her," said she cruelly, as Frances looked enquiringly in her face.
Frances paled to an almost death-like whiteness as she grasped, "God forgive you if he has. I never will!"
CHAPTER IV.
TOO LATE.
"So mournfully she gaz'd on him, As if her heart would break; Her silence more upbraided him, Than all her tongue might speak!
She could do nought but gaze on him, For answer she had none, But tears that could not be repress'd, Fell slowly, one by one.
Alas! that life should be so short— So short and yet so sad; Alas! that we so late are taught To prize the time we had! Charles Swain.
It was the evening after Amy had pledged herself to Robert Vavasour. The sun had slowly faded away, and twilight threw but a faint light into the room where she sat close to her mother's feet.
Amy had been reading to Mrs. Neville and the book still open; lay in her lap, but it was too dark to read now, too dark for her mother to see her face, so Amy drew closer still ere she broached the subject nearest her heart. There was no shrinking or timidity, as there might have been had her love been wholly his, whose wife she had promised to become.