'Be good, sweet maid, and let who can be clever;
Do lovely things, not dream them, all day long;
And so make Life, Death, and that vast For Ever,
One grand sweet song.'
Charles Kingsley.
Ethel Trelawny had long felt as though some crisis in her life were impending.
To her it seemed impossible that the unnatural state of things between her father and herself could any longer continue; something must occur to break the hideous monotony and constraint of those slowly revolving weeks and months. Latterly there had come to her that strange listening feeling to which some peculiar and sensitive temperaments are subject, when in the silence they can distinctly hear the muffled footfall of approaching sorrow.
Yet what sorrow could be more terrible than this estrangement, this death of a father's love, this chill cloud of distrust that had risen up between them!
And yet when the blow fell, filial instinct woke up in the girl's soul, all the stronger for its repression. There were times during those first forty-eight hours when she would gladly have laid down her own life if she could have restored power to those fettered limbs, and peace to that troubled brain.
Oh, if she could only have blotted out those last cruel words—if they would cease to ring in her ears!
She had met him almost timidly, knowing how heavily the bitterness of his failure would lie upon him.
'Papa, I fear things have not gone well with you,' she had said, and there had been a caressing, almost a pitying chord in her voice as she spoke.