CHAPTER VII.—LOVE AWAKENING.
Oh, love! no habitant of earth thou art—
An unseen seraph, we believe in thee,
A faith, whose martyrs are the broken heart,
But never yet hath seen, nor e’er shall see
The naked eye, thy form, as it should be;
The mind hath made thee, as it peopled heaven,
Even with its own desiring phantasy,
And to a thought such shape and image given,
As haunts, the unquench’d soul—parch’d, wearied, wrung, and riven.
-Childe Harold.
A sudden involuntary effort of the memory had nearly cost Flora Wilton her life.
In that dreadful moment, when the house in which she had for years resided was a prey to the raging flames, when her own escape—owing to the fearful rapidity with which the fire gained ascendancy—was a question of doubt, she had remembered a packet of papers, which her father had given into her charge, with injunctions to preserve it, even at the hazard of her life.
It had been placed by herself in a spot, which though secret, was yet of easy access. To obtain it would be but the act of a minute; the fire-escape conductor had yet to return to convey her from the burning house, to the street below; and she made the attempt simultaneously with the conception of the thought.
The room she entered was densely filled with smoke. She obtained the object of her search. She remembered no more.
When again consciousness returned to her, she was in the arms of Hal, high in the air, upon a dreadful slope, the ruddy glare of the roaring flames making visible to her the frightful danger of her position. She relapsed into insensibility, and when once more she opened her eyes, she found herself in bed, the motherly face of an elderly woman bending over her, and her wrist in the hand of a white-haired medical attendant, who had himself applied the restoratives which had brought her back to life.
A thousand questions thronged to her lips, first wonder, then incoherence, then, with an awakening sense of what had happened, her desolate destitute condition burst with full force upon her, and she fell into a passionate fit of weeping.
The soft, kindly voice of the woman at her side was addressed to her in soothing tones, while the strictest injunctions fell from the lips of the doctor, forbidding speech on either side. He recommended Flora to commend herself to God, and then endeavour to sleep, under the conviction that the fearful event in which she had borne so prominent a part had not involved any loss of life.