She turned her face to him and put her hands round his neck frankly: then with an uncontrollable impulse she flung herself against his breast and, clasping her arms tight, bent his head down to her level and kissed him on the forehead with the passionate sorrow, the reluctant despair of an eternal farewell. It was something that irresistibly suggested death.
Edgar was distressed at her manner, distressed to have to leave her; but he must. Life is made up of petty duties, paltry obligations. Great events come but rarely and are seldom uninterrupted. A shower of rain and the dinner-hour are parts of the mosaic and help in the catastrophe which looks as if it had been the offspring of the moment. And just now the supreme exigencies to be attended to were the dinner-hour at the Hill and the rain that was beginning to fall.
Saddened, surprised, yet gratified too by her emotion, Edgar answered it in his own way. He kissed her again and again, smoothed her hair, passed his hand over her soft fresh cheeks, held her to him tightly clasped; and Leam did not refuse his caresses. She seemed to have suddenly abandoned all the characteristics of her former self: the mask had fallen finally, and her soul, released from its long imprisonment, was receiving its gift, not of tongues, but of fire—not of healing, but of suffering.
"My darling," he half whispered, "I shall see you to-morrow. Come, do not be so cast down: it is not reasonable, my heart. And tears in those sweet eyes? My Leam, dry them: they are too beautiful for tears. Look up, my darling. Give me one happy little smile, and remember to-morrow and for all our lives after."
But Learn could not smile. Her face was set to its old mask of tragedy and sorrow. Something, she knew not what, had passed out of her life, and something had come into it—something that Edgar for the moment could neither restore nor yet banish. He pressed her to him for the last time, kissed her passive face again and again, caught the scent of the lemon-plant in her hair where he had placed it, and left her. As he passed through the gate the storm burst in all its fury, and Leam went up into her own room in a voiceless, tearless grief that made the whole earth a desert and all life desolation.
She did know herself this evening, nor understand what it was that ailed her. She had only consciously loved for two days, and this was the anguish to which she had been brought. No, not even when mamma died had she suffered as she was suffering now. She felt as if she had lost him even as she had lost her. She did not believe in to-morrow: it would never come. She would never be with him again as she had been to-day. No self-reasoning, feebly aimed at, could calm her or convince her of the folly of her fears. He had gone, she was left, and they were parted for ever.
She sat by the window desolate, deserted, more alone than she had ever been before, because she had lost more than she had ever either held or lost before. The storm that was raging in the sky grew gradually stronger and came still nearer, but she scarcely noticed it: it was only as the symphony sounding in sad harmony with her unspoken wail. Flash followed flash, swifter, nearer, more vivid; the thunder crashed and roared as if it would have beaten the house to the ground and rent the very earth whereon it stood; the rain fell in torrents that broke the flowers like hail and ran in turbulent rivulets along the paths. Never had there been such a furious tempest as this at North Aston since the days of tradition. It made the people in the village below quail and cry out that the day of judgment had come upon them: it made Leam at last forget her sorrow and quail in her solitude as if her day of judgment too had come upon her.
Then there came one awful flash that seemed to set the whole room on fire; and as Leam started up, thinking that the place was indeed in flames, her eyes fell on the Tables of the Ten Commandments given her by madame; and there, in letters of blood that seemed to cry out against her like a voice, she saw by the light of that accusing flash those words of terrible significance to her:
THOU SHALT DO NO MURDER!
[TO BE CONTINUED.]