“You gave me a talisman, Agnes,” said the speaker, growing more excited; “I have carried it all over the world.”
“Well,” said Agnes as he paused. She looked at him very earnestly, without even a blush at the sound of her own name.
“Well—better than well!” cried Lionel; “wonderful—invincible—divine! I went to try your spell—I who trusted nothing—at the moment when everything had failed me—even you. I put yonder sublime Friend of yours to the experiment—I dared to do it! I took his name to the sorrowful, as you bade me. I cast out devils with his name, as the sorcerers tried to do. I put all the hope I could have in life upon the trial. Now I come to tell you the issue; it is fit that you should know.”
Agnes leaned forward towards him, listening eagerly; she could not quite tell what she expected—a confession of faith.
“I am a man of ambition,” said Lionel, turning in a moment from the high and solemn excitement of his former speech, with a sudden smile like a gleam of sunshine. “You remember my projects when I was heir of Winterbourne. You knew them, though I did not tell you; now I have found a cave in a wild mining district among a race of giants. I am Vicar of Botallach, among the Cornish men—have been for four-and-twenty hours—that is the end.”
Agnes had put out her hand to him in the first impulse of joy and congratulation; a second thought, more subtle, made her pause, and blush, and draw back. Lionel was not so foolish as to wait the end of this self-controversy. He left his seat, came to her side, took the hand firmly into his own, which she half gave, and half withdrew—did not blush, but grew pale, with the quiet concern of a man who was about deciding the happiness of his life. “The end, but the beginning too,” said Lionel, with a tremor in his voice. “Agnes hear me still—I have something more to say.”
She did not answer a word; she lifted her eyes to his face with one hurried, agitated momentary glance. Something more! but the whole tale was in the look. They did not know very well what words followed, and neither do we.
THE END.
PRINTED BY WILLIAM BLACKWOOD AND SONS, EDINBURGH.