Before it came, however, he could not resist guiding his sister to a last visit to the haunt of their childhood, Merlin's Cave. And there for no little space they sat in silence, thinking over the happiness of by-gone days. The day was even warmer than those which had preceded it, but it was close and heavy. The sea lay before the orphans, perfectly smooth, sleeping in its might; and there was no breath of air to waft aside the lightest bubble it might leave upon the rock; but some round massive clouds were rising one behind another in the south-western horizon, which might indicate the coming of a storm.
"Farewell to Trevethlan!" Randolph said. "Let me hear our old song once more."
And Helen sang the ancestral ditty, but with an accent very different from that she gave it on the eve of their previous journey to the metropolis.
"Farewell to Trevethlan! A farewell for ever!
Farewell to the towers that stand by the sea!"
"Remember, Helen," her brother said, "how you checked me when I told you your song was of ill omen. And believe me now, when I say that, like Reginald, we shall live to see a joyful revolution."
Ill news flies fast. The intelligence of the verdict had spread in the hamlet, and its immediate effect was exaggerated by the villagers. The coming departure of their young master and mistress also travelled from the castle to the green, and added to the excitement. Groups collected both of sorrowing women and of threatening men. The lapse of time only increased the numbers and the exasperation of the tenantry. The people speedily forgot all those rumours concerning their late lord's marriage, which of old gratified their envy, and which had probably contributed in no small degree to the result of the trial. They only considered the event of the day; that the last representative of the family with which they had been connected for centuries was now to be driven from his home, by a deserter who had sold himself to a rival house; and many among them resolved, that if they could prevent it, by right or wrong, it should not be so that "Pendar'l and Trevethlan should own one name."
"And so ye were right after all, dame," said farmer Colan to the landlady of the Trevethlan Arms. "The old saying's come true with a vengeance. But there's no Miss Mildred in the case."
"And Madam Pendarrel's not come to Trevethlan yet, farmer," was the answer. "And there's many a slip 'twixt the cup and the lip."
"There's like to be a slip here," cried a voice in the crowd, "such as she little knows."
"It's a curious sort of day for the season," said Breage. "So warm and heavy. I should say there was some prognostication in the air."